It’s worked! I don’t believe it – I think it’s actually worked! Ladies and Gentlemen, I think I may actually be making home made blackberry wine. Well b*gg*r me.
On Wednesday, Dermot the Techie came to the house to remove all the lovely kit that the company had installed here almost three years ago when I started working for them. My hunky PC (two screens, massive RAM, goes like a Lambourghini when I’m on a roll) my business phones complete with fancy headsets, my printer (he’s welcome to that one – bloody thing drives me insane maundering on about its cartridges when I’m trying to get on with something) and even my lovely spare hard drive. But first of all he wanted to see the chooks. He knew about my pair, and was thinking of getting a few himself.
Smarting from his mission to strip me of my professional assets and reduce me to a single laptop and broadband that I actually have to pay for, I marched him out the back for a quick teach-in on Chickens and Why Not to Have Them.
He caught on as soon as he stepped out of the kitchen door, of course. Whilst he was scraping the excrement off his loafer, I explained that what comes out of the end of a chicken per diem, or out of ours, anyway, is one egg max and an absolutely astonishing quantity of guano, out of all proportion to the egg, the chicken, or indeed in my case the back terrace. The chooks spend a sizable portion of their day hanging around outside the kitchen door, pecking at the window in the hope of stimulating me into providing food, and crapping for England. As a result, step outside and you walk straight into a midden.
So it only took a brief inspection of the lawn, the vegetable patches and other devastated areas for Dermot to decide against chickens. But somehow the subject got around to wine-making, and here he turned out to be an old hand.
Dermot spent years, apparently, churning out gallons of Chateau Dermot from a second floor flat in Banbury. It had, he explained, a south facing balcony with sliding glass doors. The demi-johns ranged in the sunlit warmth behind the glass, where they bubbled away merrily like something out of Harry Potter. The results were, he said, spectacular. He also made rum out of marrows. You fill the marrows with brown sugar then hang them in the window to drip. That’s it, no yeast sachets or Campden tablets, just a marrow, some sugar and the sun – how idyllic. Sounds improbable to me,but there we go, and he said it was absolutely delicious. I wonder why he stopped doing it? Maybe his wife objected to window decorations of decomposing marrow. Women can be funny like that. We both realised, incidentally, that we had no idea what Jamaican, as opposed to Banbury, Rum is actually made of (apart from sugar, or course). So I have looked it up for you.
Anyway, a bloke who can make rum by dangling a marrow clearly knows a bit about homemade hooch, so I took him to visit the my own distillery, comprising around 25 pints of purple liquid in a plastic bottle.
I’m not committing myself, you see to the nature of the liquid. At that point, I was fairly confident it wasn’t wine, or even prospective wine. I reckoned it was sugared blackberry juice. And Dermot’s talk of ‘bubbling away merrily’ seemed to confirm my very worst fears. The recipe I had been following (about which much more below) described the pleasure of listening to the happy plops and gurgles as the fermentation gases make their way out of the airlock My airlock was totally bloody silent. I’d checked the seal, checked that I’d got the water level right, tried sneaking up on it and listening when it didn’t know I was there, like an anxious mother with a sleeping babe, but…nothing. Things were not looking good.
I blamed the equipment (when in doubt, blame the equipment). Thanks to the wonders of eBay and my lousy knowledge of geography, I had driven about 50 miles to acquire a garage full of second hand wine making kit, including 52 wine bottles (alas, empty) some big plastic buckets and a large cardboard box full of an astonishing range of unidentified ‘stuff’. There were several rubber bungs with airlocks poking out of them, but my eye was caught by one spectacularly high-tech version which had what looked like a tiny emersion heater wired into it. Just dangle the heater in the liquid, bung in the bung, plug the whole lot in and … bingo!
I hesitated at first. There was no thermostat on the thing, so how would I set it to the right temperature? Then it dawned on me that (a) if it was designed for winemaking, it would be preset to the right temperature and (b) its not as though I knew what the right temperature was anyway. A more pressing problem was that there is no electrical socket in the airing cupboard, selected, as I do not have a south facing balcony, as the warmest place in the house for my wine to live
Ah, but with the emersion heater working, it would not need to sit in the warmest place in the house, I could carry it down to the utility room, where the 52 bottles and the cardboard box were already sitting, and plug it in there.
So I hauled my 25 pints of blackberry juice downstairs. This saddened me, as I had been rather proud of the practicality with which I had made up the bottle upstairs, so that I would not have to carry up a heavy container and risk it collapsing on the stairs and wrecking the carpets. The questionable hygiene involved in perching the thing on the bathroom toilet whilst working, hardly in the spirit of the great Premier Crus, seemed a small price to pay. Now I had to drag the wretched object all the way through the house.
But I got there, lowered and plugged in the emersion heater, taped down the socket switch so that nobody could interfere with it, and waited for the Miracle at Cana to do a rerun.
So here Dermot and I were, eight days later, standing in a chilly utility room staring down onto the passive, opaque surface of was pretty certainly a whole lot of cold, stagnant blackberry juice. The tiny emersion heater glowed hopefully as we raised it from the depths, but it had evidently been inadequate to the task.
‘No, that’s had it’ said Dermot smugly. And I was not surprised.
However, as a mother will cling pitifully to the tiny corpse of her dead baby, I could not bear to acknowledge the death of my hopes and the waste of all those blackberries. Against any logic, I dragged the dead weight back up the stairs and into the reviving warmth of the airing cupboard. Tenderly I swaddled the demijohn in fleecy towels and old blankets. The warmth it lacked in life, I would give it in death. I decided to allow it 24 hours to revive spontaneously, after which I would creep out at dead of night and pour it down the drain. No-one need ever know.
The next morning showed no signs of life. I adjusted its swaddling clothes and decided to see if there was any winemaking advice online that could help me.
In the study, my decimated desk yawned back at me. I had forgotten the reason why Dermot came in the first place. There was no online.
Undaunted, I set off for my nearest public library. I would return to the technologies of the ancients. I would look it up in a book.
There were books on how to drink wine in the library (apparently there are those who can’t do it uninstructed) and books on how to mix cocktails. But nothing on how to make wine. A check on in the online catalogue showed that all the books were on loan, presumably to people like me with an airing cupboard full of blackberry juice. However, this in itself brought a relevation – you can go surf for free in libraries, for a whole half-hour. It had already crossed my mind that I could seek out an internet café, but I’ve always muddled them up with Cannibis cafes in Amsterdam and anyway I get baffled by the complexities of ordering in Starbucks, so the whole thing seemed pretty scary. But this is easy – you just need your library card. You don’t even have to buy a coffee.
In five minutes I had keyed in ‘stuck fermentation’ and got all the advice I needed. Depending upon where you are stuck, at any point between 1000 and 1080, you can either add more yeast, add a special re-start yeast, or creep out at dead of night etc etc.
Victorious, I returned home to the cardboard box to find something to measure my blackberry juice with. There was a very small box labelled, curiously, ‘vino-o-meter’. Perfect. It was a fragile glass object wrapped tenderly in tissue paper and, sadly, it only wenjt up to 25. If only I had bothered to find what I should have 1080 of.
Instead, I made a pragmatic decision to add more yeast and give it yet another 24 hours.
I made up the yeast, took it up to the airing cupboard, opened the door and … ‘plop…(gurgle)…’
Had my ears deceived me? Had the stress of it all finally got to me? Or were there actually signs of life in that thur demijohn? I closed the door, lurked outside for a bit, opened it again and …surely that was another faint ‘plop’?
I swaddled the demijohn yet closer, closed the door tenderly, crept down stairs and emptied the yeast down the sink.
From time to time during the day I stood listening at the airing cupboard for further signs of life. Not a sound. I had hope now, but it was again fading fast. And I had no more yeast.
That was yesterday. This morning I woke and immediately checked on the demijohn. Nothing. I had an idea. I fetched a breakfast cup, turned the little tap at the base of the demijohn, and poured myself a dribble of cloudy dark pink liquid. And sipped
Reader, it nearly blew my head off. It certainly wasn’t blackberry juice, and it wasn’t exactly paintstripper either. It was, in fact, rather thin, very sour but almost definitely wine.
I dug out the vino-o-meter and after a couple of false starts worked out how to get a reading. Yes, I had proof – and Proof. I was back in the winemaking business.
I have just returned from the bathroom where, after much siphoning (during which accidentally swallowed a certain amount of the stuff – hopefully it will grow on me) and a third round of sugar, I snuggled my precious demi-john back into its airing cupboard. It promptly rewarded me with a couple of loud, satisfied belches. I couldn’t be prouder.
One last thing. I said I had proof. In fact, according to the vino-o-meter, I have a whopping 17 per cent Proof. And it’s still fermenting….
Gentle reader, could it be that I am now making blackberry liqueur?
On Wednesday, Dermot the Techie came to the house to remove all the lovely kit that the company had installed here almost three years ago when I started working for them. My hunky PC (two screens, massive RAM, goes like a Lambourghini when I’m on a roll) my business phones complete with fancy headsets, my printer (he’s welcome to that one – bloody thing drives me insane maundering on about its cartridges when I’m trying to get on with something) and even my lovely spare hard drive. But first of all he wanted to see the chooks. He knew about my pair, and was thinking of getting a few himself.
Smarting from his mission to strip me of my professional assets and reduce me to a single laptop and broadband that I actually have to pay for, I marched him out the back for a quick teach-in on Chickens and Why Not to Have Them.
He caught on as soon as he stepped out of the kitchen door, of course. Whilst he was scraping the excrement off his loafer, I explained that what comes out of the end of a chicken per diem, or out of ours, anyway, is one egg max and an absolutely astonishing quantity of guano, out of all proportion to the egg, the chicken, or indeed in my case the back terrace. The chooks spend a sizable portion of their day hanging around outside the kitchen door, pecking at the window in the hope of stimulating me into providing food, and crapping for England. As a result, step outside and you walk straight into a midden.
So it only took a brief inspection of the lawn, the vegetable patches and other devastated areas for Dermot to decide against chickens. But somehow the subject got around to wine-making, and here he turned out to be an old hand.
Dermot spent years, apparently, churning out gallons of Chateau Dermot from a second floor flat in Banbury. It had, he explained, a south facing balcony with sliding glass doors. The demi-johns ranged in the sunlit warmth behind the glass, where they bubbled away merrily like something out of Harry Potter. The results were, he said, spectacular. He also made rum out of marrows. You fill the marrows with brown sugar then hang them in the window to drip. That’s it, no yeast sachets or Campden tablets, just a marrow, some sugar and the sun – how idyllic. Sounds improbable to me,but there we go, and he said it was absolutely delicious. I wonder why he stopped doing it? Maybe his wife objected to window decorations of decomposing marrow. Women can be funny like that. We both realised, incidentally, that we had no idea what Jamaican, as opposed to Banbury, Rum is actually made of (apart from sugar, or course). So I have looked it up for you.
Anyway, a bloke who can make rum by dangling a marrow clearly knows a bit about homemade hooch, so I took him to visit the my own distillery, comprising around 25 pints of purple liquid in a plastic bottle.
I’m not committing myself, you see to the nature of the liquid. At that point, I was fairly confident it wasn’t wine, or even prospective wine. I reckoned it was sugared blackberry juice. And Dermot’s talk of ‘bubbling away merrily’ seemed to confirm my very worst fears. The recipe I had been following (about which much more below) described the pleasure of listening to the happy plops and gurgles as the fermentation gases make their way out of the airlock My airlock was totally bloody silent. I’d checked the seal, checked that I’d got the water level right, tried sneaking up on it and listening when it didn’t know I was there, like an anxious mother with a sleeping babe, but…nothing. Things were not looking good.
I blamed the equipment (when in doubt, blame the equipment). Thanks to the wonders of eBay and my lousy knowledge of geography, I had driven about 50 miles to acquire a garage full of second hand wine making kit, including 52 wine bottles (alas, empty) some big plastic buckets and a large cardboard box full of an astonishing range of unidentified ‘stuff’. There were several rubber bungs with airlocks poking out of them, but my eye was caught by one spectacularly high-tech version which had what looked like a tiny emersion heater wired into it. Just dangle the heater in the liquid, bung in the bung, plug the whole lot in and … bingo!
I hesitated at first. There was no thermostat on the thing, so how would I set it to the right temperature? Then it dawned on me that (a) if it was designed for winemaking, it would be preset to the right temperature and (b) its not as though I knew what the right temperature was anyway. A more pressing problem was that there is no electrical socket in the airing cupboard, selected, as I do not have a south facing balcony, as the warmest place in the house for my wine to live
Ah, but with the emersion heater working, it would not need to sit in the warmest place in the house, I could carry it down to the utility room, where the 52 bottles and the cardboard box were already sitting, and plug it in there.
So I hauled my 25 pints of blackberry juice downstairs. This saddened me, as I had been rather proud of the practicality with which I had made up the bottle upstairs, so that I would not have to carry up a heavy container and risk it collapsing on the stairs and wrecking the carpets. The questionable hygiene involved in perching the thing on the bathroom toilet whilst working, hardly in the spirit of the great Premier Crus, seemed a small price to pay. Now I had to drag the wretched object all the way through the house.
But I got there, lowered and plugged in the emersion heater, taped down the socket switch so that nobody could interfere with it, and waited for the Miracle at Cana to do a rerun.
So here Dermot and I were, eight days later, standing in a chilly utility room staring down onto the passive, opaque surface of was pretty certainly a whole lot of cold, stagnant blackberry juice. The tiny emersion heater glowed hopefully as we raised it from the depths, but it had evidently been inadequate to the task.
‘No, that’s had it’ said Dermot smugly. And I was not surprised.
However, as a mother will cling pitifully to the tiny corpse of her dead baby, I could not bear to acknowledge the death of my hopes and the waste of all those blackberries. Against any logic, I dragged the dead weight back up the stairs and into the reviving warmth of the airing cupboard. Tenderly I swaddled the demijohn in fleecy towels and old blankets. The warmth it lacked in life, I would give it in death. I decided to allow it 24 hours to revive spontaneously, after which I would creep out at dead of night and pour it down the drain. No-one need ever know.
The next morning showed no signs of life. I adjusted its swaddling clothes and decided to see if there was any winemaking advice online that could help me.
In the study, my decimated desk yawned back at me. I had forgotten the reason why Dermot came in the first place. There was no online.
Undaunted, I set off for my nearest public library. I would return to the technologies of the ancients. I would look it up in a book.
There were books on how to drink wine in the library (apparently there are those who can’t do it uninstructed) and books on how to mix cocktails. But nothing on how to make wine. A check on in the online catalogue showed that all the books were on loan, presumably to people like me with an airing cupboard full of blackberry juice. However, this in itself brought a relevation – you can go surf for free in libraries, for a whole half-hour. It had already crossed my mind that I could seek out an internet café, but I’ve always muddled them up with Cannibis cafes in Amsterdam and anyway I get baffled by the complexities of ordering in Starbucks, so the whole thing seemed pretty scary. But this is easy – you just need your library card. You don’t even have to buy a coffee.
In five minutes I had keyed in ‘stuck fermentation’ and got all the advice I needed. Depending upon where you are stuck, at any point between 1000 and 1080, you can either add more yeast, add a special re-start yeast, or creep out at dead of night etc etc.
Victorious, I returned home to the cardboard box to find something to measure my blackberry juice with. There was a very small box labelled, curiously, ‘vino-o-meter’. Perfect. It was a fragile glass object wrapped tenderly in tissue paper and, sadly, it only wenjt up to 25. If only I had bothered to find what I should have 1080 of.
Instead, I made a pragmatic decision to add more yeast and give it yet another 24 hours.
I made up the yeast, took it up to the airing cupboard, opened the door and … ‘plop…(gurgle)…’
Had my ears deceived me? Had the stress of it all finally got to me? Or were there actually signs of life in that thur demijohn? I closed the door, lurked outside for a bit, opened it again and …surely that was another faint ‘plop’?
I swaddled the demijohn yet closer, closed the door tenderly, crept down stairs and emptied the yeast down the sink.
From time to time during the day I stood listening at the airing cupboard for further signs of life. Not a sound. I had hope now, but it was again fading fast. And I had no more yeast.
That was yesterday. This morning I woke and immediately checked on the demijohn. Nothing. I had an idea. I fetched a breakfast cup, turned the little tap at the base of the demijohn, and poured myself a dribble of cloudy dark pink liquid. And sipped
Reader, it nearly blew my head off. It certainly wasn’t blackberry juice, and it wasn’t exactly paintstripper either. It was, in fact, rather thin, very sour but almost definitely wine.
I dug out the vino-o-meter and after a couple of false starts worked out how to get a reading. Yes, I had proof – and Proof. I was back in the winemaking business.
I have just returned from the bathroom where, after much siphoning (during which accidentally swallowed a certain amount of the stuff – hopefully it will grow on me) and a third round of sugar, I snuggled my precious demi-john back into its airing cupboard. It promptly rewarded me with a couple of loud, satisfied belches. I couldn’t be prouder.
One last thing. I said I had proof. In fact, according to the vino-o-meter, I have a whopping 17 per cent Proof. And it’s still fermenting….
Gentle reader, could it be that I am now making blackberry liqueur?
-----------------------------------------------------------
I have been following, and more recently deviating (probably disastrously) from, the blackberry wine recipe appearing at http://www.familyherbalremedies.com/blackberry_wine_recipe
Stephen Buhner's recipe is beautifully and reassuringly written, and any shortcoming in my own efforts at wine production is entirely due to operator error and failure to follow instructions
--------------------------
Postscript:
What did the grape say when it was crushed? Nothing, it just gave a little wine....
Stephen Buhner's recipe is beautifully and reassuringly written, and any shortcoming in my own efforts at wine production is entirely due to operator error and failure to follow instructions
--------------------------
Postscript:
What did the grape say when it was crushed? Nothing, it just gave a little wine....
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