Wine Brewing

Mid-September is the best time to pick blackberries as they will be at their ripest. And National Blackberry Day celebrates this on September 12th when our hedgerows will be full of those plump black fruits that make an excellent homemade red wine. Come home with about half a carrier bag full of black berries and you’ll be ready to turn these into a gallon of blackberry wine.

Let’s get practical with two wine-beer hybrid recipes that you can make at home. I’ll share my Orange, Ginger and Wheat wine recipe that was so tasty it won first prize in a local winemakers’ show and the second is Gladys Blacklock’s Carrot and Hops wine from her book Modern Winemaking Techniques.

When wine is made from grapes and beer from malted barley, the question of whether there is a cross-over in flavours between the two is surely a non-starter. But add in country wines made by the home winemaker using fruits that aren’t grapes and flavoured with an A-Z of herbs and spices and the question starts to sound like there might be something in it.

When Burgundy wine yeast doesn’t automatically turn your country-style wine recipe into Burgundy tasting French red wine, or when adding a teaspoon of all-purpose dried yeast to start your elderberry Port results in a not-quite-finished stuck fermentation then just how do you go about choosing the right wine yeast for your home winemaking recipes? The answer lies in how much time you have to think about it.

Classic cheese and wine pairing advice suggests it’s Bordeaux reds and expensive sweet Sauternes when cheese is on the menu. But home winemakers can expand the wine list to include wines made with flowers and fruits – and even go one step further and make their own cheese too.

So you know you like rosé wine but how do you choose a rosé wine kit that will give the flavours you enjoy. The answer lies in knowing your...

Making strawberry wine is one way of using up the excess of berries brought back from that tempting Pick Your Own farm day out. And although the recipe is easy to follow, the resulting delicately flavoured rosé wine has to be treated with care if it isn’t to fade its colour and oxidise all the taste away.

With the earliest of garden fruits only starting to ripen in June, late spring sees a fermentation gap in our calendars. This is where the almost forgotten contents at the bottom of our freezer comes into play – those carefully harvested blackberries, blackcurrants, raspberries, elderberries, plums, apples, rhubarb and gooseberries that were promised for winter jams and tarts can be turned into a tasty, everyday drinking red wine instead.

The LoNo wine category, containing less than 0.5% alcohol, has been growing at a pace on the commercial side of the wine aisle. But home wine makers have been making this style of wine for generations using wild flowers and herbs. And now is a great time to join in as late May and early June sees the huge white heads of the elderflower adorning the hedgerows.

So you know you like white wine but how do you choose the white wine kit that will give the flavours you’ll enjoy. The answer lies in that breakfast favourite – buttered toast topped with marmalade.

With just eight weeks until The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, running between Thursday 2 and Sunday 5 June 2022, there’s just enough time to get brewing and make yourself some homemade wines and even some ginger beer to help with the seventieth anniversary Bank Holiday celebrations.

Racking is the process of moving your home-made wine from one vessel to another. But when this involves moving up to 25kg of liquid, how do you do this without putting your back out?

When supermarket wines are described has having flavours of blackberry or cherry, or even gooseberry and banana, then why can’t we just cut to the chase and drink wines made from these fruits instead? The answer is you can.

So you know you like red wine but how do you choose the red wine kit that will give the flavours you’ll enjoy.

The homebrew wine world often reflects what’s going on in vineyard-made wines. And that’s infusing hops in finished white wines: dry-hopping them in...

Wine kits: Do I need any equipment? Wine kits contain just the juice used to make your 6 or 30 bottles of home-made wine and so you'll need some...