FOOD Making your own wine (Part 2)

Infusing good water with chopped up fruit or vegetables can lead to a pleasant tasting liquid once sugar is added.

Making fine wine


Food Matters
Chris Brown

Brewing wine at home, like brewing beer, and in some regions cider, has a long and colourful history and many great stories have been told and heard by those sampling the goods. In the past making wine from hedgerow and garden surplus gave every household, however limited its resources might be, the opportunity to greet a visitor with a tasty drink or the chance to bring a bottle to a barndance.
Here in County Mayo, if barley grain was readily available, it would find lots of top quality water to make good beer with, and, as fine water is a major ingredient of beer, it surprises me that some small (nowadays called micro) breweries haven’t started up somewhere in the county.
Suitable barley is currently hard to find however, so logically if you fancy a go at the art of brewing, wine is the best choice, because you can make wine from lots of different plants. Things that should be easy enough to find, like blackberries, carrots or apples, elder (both flower and berries), or gorse flowers if your picking skills are of premiership standards, can all produce excellent results.

Reasonable quantities
But please be mindful, you have to hand in reasonable quantity, and be aware that chemical sprays might have been used on road edges and pathways so careful choice of material will be needed.
Sour fruits like sloes and crab apples make good wine as do blackcurrants and if you are planting material for the purpose of winemaking get hold of some blackcurrant plants or cuttings as they grow really well in our climate and are packed with goodness and mix well in a combination with other fruit.
If you have some space in a vegetable ridge plan to plant some parsnips. Keep the best samples for Sunday lunch and all the big, split or mis-shapen roots to make a wholesome wine because nothing starts the singing, dancing and general merryment better than a few glasses of it.
Making wine starts like making tea - good water is infused for flavour with tasty leaves or flowers (or chopped up fruit or vegetables) to give a pleasant tasting liquid to which sugar will need to be added.
The brew will need to be warm (20c/70f being the ideal) to suit Mr Yeast, who only works when things are sweet and warm, and who can blame him.
Once yeast is introduced to your mash it’s ‘game on’. Be sure to cover the brew with an old towel or similar insulating material to maintain warm conditions: if Mr Yeast is happy he will keep you happy by making some alcohol for you!

Wine kits
The tough thing about making wine from gathered ingredients is that it takes lots of patience. You’ll have to keep your hands off it for quite a long time (maybe as long as a year) while it clears and improves, and for this reason I’d suggest having a go at brewing from a wine kit, which are excellent and can be ready in a little over a month.
Of all the fruit, grapes are the governor, – the pick of the bunch, and grapes need no introduction in matters to do with the making of fine wine. Wine kits contain something superb - concentrated grape juice.
The gathering, handling and squeezing all done, the liquid is reduced in size to fit neatly into a tin ready for action. What could be any better? A wine kit comes with instructions, yeast in a satchet and usually some other optional bits and bobs that might help the process.
You’ll need to have ready the bucketry, a warm site to keep the wine (worktop height is advisable as it helps when transferring liquid if you don’t start at floor level), a stash of bottles (a standard kit will make about 30 bottles of the 750ml size). And when it’s ready, a few friends to come round to help with the drinking.

Next time Community Kitchen

Chris Brown is a food producer in Louisburgh. He has a particular interest in food miles and buying local.