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Making your own wine

Just wondering if anyone else does this? I grow my own soft fruit so 6 bottles of wine are the cost of one bag of sugar and a teaspoon of yeast - less than 30p a bottle.
Plus you have the excitement of opening the first bottle...will it be OK? Will it be fabulous? Will it be only fit for cooking with?
I also harvest hawthorn berries ( my favourite wine), rosehips and blackberries from the wild.
It is a bit of a cost to get started but you can pick up most of the required equipment second hand and you really don't need all the calculations so many books and websites talk about; just chuck it all in and see what happens that's what I've done for the last 30 years and never had any completely unusable
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  • alicef
    alicef Posts: 503 Forumite
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    We make wine having 3 grapevines.  I can't face thinning the grapes, plus they have seeds, so we harvest them for wine.  My OH bungs in a wine kit.  The end result is a rose wine which is lovely.
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  • DullGreyGuy
    DullGreyGuy Posts: 15,568 Forumite
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    Was something my father used to do with a combination of fruit from the garden (plums, apples, crab apples, rose hips, blackberries, gooseberries) and from foraging the local area (elderflower, various other berries etc).  Always a bit of debate on if things should be used for jams or wines. 

    Most of them turned out ok for drinking, unlikely to win any awards but perfectly drinkable at the family BBQ etc. Dont recall it ever being used for cooking but maybe it was. A few years after he died there were still a few jars of it in the garage... it had certainly turned so went down the drain when my mother downsized. 

    Had considered doing some myself but living in a highly urban area the availability of fruits is much lower and I dont have patience. 
  • Floss
    Floss Posts: 8,879 Forumite
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    My ex was a trained chemist and made very good wine from the apples, rhubarb & strawberries from my allotment. He also made excellent from quite expensive kits, but I guess that balanced out the predominantly free fruit!
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  • greyteam1959
    greyteam1959 Posts: 4,660 Forumite
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    I use wine kits & have done for around 20 years.
    I also make a superb sparkling wine, distill my own spirits & brew my own beers.
    Can't do with the faff of fruit wines &:their somewhat dubious results 

  • Floss
    Floss Posts: 8,879 Forumite
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    Can't do with the faff of fruit wines &:their somewhat dubious results 

    If done carefully, apple, strawberry or rhubarb wines are delicious. 
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  • Last summer, inspired by Sandor Katz and my forays into fermented drinks and foods, I tried my hand at elderflower and honey wine/mead. It fermented away in a big crock and I bottled it up. 
    We tried it some months later and it is disgusting! 😖 I'm letting it rest in the hope that it will miraculously improve but I suspect it's going to clean the bog at some point.
    My advice: prepare to fail!
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  • FlorayG
    FlorayG Posts: 1,534 Forumite
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    Last summer, inspired by Sandor Katz and my forays into fermented drinks and foods, I tried my hand at elderflower and honey wine/mead. It fermented away in a big crock and I bottled it up. 
    We tried it some months later and it is disgusting! 😖 I'm letting it rest in the hope that it will miraculously improve but I suspect it's going to clean the bog at some point.
    My advice: prepare to fail!
    Flower wines are difficult. Fruit wines are much more like the real thing
  • Brambling
    Brambling Posts: 5,621 Forumite
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    Both my aunt (a farmers wife) and my eldest sister were great wine makers, gathered fruit, elderflower, elderberry, sloes, wild damsons  etc etc and my aunt also made a beautiful mead.  All were delicious and deadly most didn't taste like alcohol so you would be ok until you tried to stand, my almost teetotal mum would get quite 'merry' as she would forget it packed a punch.  

    My sister tried making ginger beer once but that exploded in the garage 😁
    Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage   -          Anais Nin
  • goldfinches
    goldfinches Posts: 2,325 Forumite
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    These comments all bring back lots of memories for me because my father was very keen on brewing his own beer, making wine and trying to distil that into brandy etc. My mother also made elderflower champagne for many years and then they bought a fruit press to juice their surplus apples. 
    My father got very good at beers from kits particularly stout but did have several memorable accidents with bottles exploding and so on, the marks on the ceiling were very hard to remove.
    I remember dandelion wine smelling deliciously of nectar but not tasting very nice which was a disappointment and picking all the flowers was a real chore.
    Elderflower champagne was always nice but you need empty champagne bottles with new stoppers so if you can't get those for free it's quite expensive.
    I tend to make flavoured cordials and spirits and usually make the Blackberry liqueur on the BBC good food site as well as sloe gin/vodka and have also made elderflower cordial this year and am planning to try meadowsweet cordial as well. 

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  • Brambling
    Brambling Posts: 5,621 Forumite
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    edited 28 June 2024 at 6:56PM
    Blackberry whiskey is really nice and I'm not a whiskey drinker 🙂 it could of been because I used a bottle of glenfiddich I won in a raffle 🤔 

    Blackcurrant gin or vodka,grown up Ribena 😋 and after removing the fruit from the alcohol use them as adult ice cream toppings
    Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage   -          Anais Nin
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