OH has now filled and corked 6 bottles of elderberry wine. It started its life as elderberry syrup made from our hedgerow harvest last year and then, as we just didn't use it up, OH put it into the demijohn along with red grape juice and (oddly) champagne yeast in April this year. It bubbled away merrily in the darkness under the stairs, but now it was time to process it further.
It tastes remarkably similar to our usual £5 bottle of merlot and it hasn't even matured yet -- apparently, it's meant to stay in the bottle for at least another year to mellow it out.
OH has designed a beautiful label and the bottles now look like real wines. His parents are due to visit next weekend, and they'll be the first visitors to taste it.
I'm very proud of him -- now we have our own wine to drink alongside our weekend dinners (lamb couscous tonight, with homegrown sweetcorn and mint, and possibly even some spinach). OH keeps trying to sell me the line that his experiments result in a cheaper bottle of wine -- I don't quite believe this once you add up the costs of the new wine bottles, corks, foils, labels, the extra sugar, the red grape juice (extortionate!), the airlocks etc., but I have found that whatever you've grown yourself or made yourself is usually much more fun to consume.
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