Wine at 60p a bottle

One thing Mr A has always enjoyed is a nice bottle of red wine at the weekend. I also use a glass or two in various favourite recipes. Having once made a gallon of white wine from hedgerow flowers some thirty five years ago which turned out surprisingly nice for something costing the price of two lemons and a bag of sugar I decided to have another shot at it last year. Little did I realise that there were so many recipes to try and soon I became gleefully addicted to trying them out. At 30p to 60p a bottle an undrinkable failure isn't much of a loss. The cost of new equipment is the major cost. Glass demi-johns, however, last for years with care so I started asking around to see if anyone wanted to clear their sheds out.

My first free to collect demi-john contact said she had a few and another lady thought she had eight. I thought fifteen in total would be ample. One of the contacts lived on a remote hillside at the top of a mile or so of private road. I say "road" it was a track and the going quickly went from fair to wide shallow potholes to rutted. After the third gate we realised that not only were the ruts getting deeper but the ruts had potholes and there no passing places. It took a long time to cover that mile or so accompanied by the periodic scraping sound of the exhaust pipe as a wheel plunged into a puddle.

Demi-john offers, which we felt we couldn't then refuse, came flying in until we had 2 half gallon size flagons and lost count at 26 x 1 gallon size. Happily a neighbour was just starting up production after a break so he took some.

We had a similar experience when the elderberries came into season, a friend went out collecting and sent us six pounds of frozen berries. Is it any good though? Well, the berry wines won't be ready until Christmas but the supermarket juice wines are fine after just a month or two and smell appetising. The only problem with some of them is that the first couple of glasses seem to have no effect. In such cases it is the third glass that reveals the potency. The usual cost is around 60p to 80p a bottle but the cheapest came out 24p. We are off now to stock up on red grape juice and sugar for a new batch.

Cheers!