Wine making from the garden

bertrand-mabel

Good morning all. A lovely sunny day thank goodness but windy.

Just set up the 2nd demijon of primrose wine. They are great to have in the garden as they will continue to produce more flowers for months on end and what a superb wine they produce.

Looking forward to the elderflowers later in the spring. Another great white wine with the perfume of the elder flowers still there.

Do any of you also make wine from plants in their garden?

pansyface

I don’t think my back would be up to picking enough primroses.

In my younger days I did once make some gorse flower wine, which was jolly good. 

Dovefromabove

I used to @bertrand-mabel 😊 when I lived in a bigger house with outbuildings and had more space ... don’t have the storage space or do enough entertaining to warrant it now, but back in the day I even won a prize or two at the village show.  I handed my equipment on to another winemaker a few years ago. 

This was my ‘bible’
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/drink-your-own-garden/author/judith-glover/  

Lyn

My parents used to make wine from anything they could harvest.  The best was the elder flower then the berries.  They tried dandelion once, it was horrible.
Then there was the pea pods,   It was all a great experiment in the 60/70’s .
I remember once a big marrow they’d grown standing over a bowl with fruit fermenting in it, supposed to be Marrow Rum.  Would blow your socks off 😀

My friend thought she’d have a go,  she picked every head off her rose bushes,  whilst it was beautiful, her husband went mad. 😱

Buttercupdays

My mum used to. I remember her elderberry wine especially, as my brother and I were given it if we ever got a bad cold. Made it almost worth it

She made apple wine too and various others, there was always a demi-john of something bubbling away in a corner of the dining room. But it was her foray into making saki that I remember for rendering her the most inebriated!

pansyface

A friend’s rice and raisin wine was almost like sherry. In a pleasant way.

B3

I used to make wine out of tinned fruit. lychees or mandarines made the best wine.

BobTheGardener

I used to brew a gooseberry wine which was so good that friends regularly offered me tempting amounts of actual money for it (which I refused, of course.)  I think the high-alcohol-tolerance yeast employed may have been a factor!  I don't drink these days and so crumble it is!

steephill

I have only used the more obvious ingredients so far - apples for cider and grapes for wine.

I planted a couple of cider varieties to supplement the cox and bramley I already had. I can manage to make about 50 litres most years and could do more but it is hard and slow work.

If I get a decent crop of grapes I make a rosé from the various varieties I have but I did make a pure chardonnay one year which did taste as it should have!

Many years ago we used to make raspberry, bramble and rose hip wines from foraged berries. Now that I have plenty of strawberries I should really try to make Erdbeerschaumwein - sparkling strawberry wine, a Swiss and German speciality.

tui34

Blackberry nip and liqueur of lemon verbena.  Make good Christmas presents.

fidgetbones

30 pounds of blackberries went into 5 gallons of blackberry 76. By 1980 it was like nectar.  We picked them in the local woods where we used to walk the dog.