Home made wine

So we've just had a baby, moved house, made umpteen jars of chutney and jam and are now embarking on the home made wine ~ are we mad? Of course!

The wine idea came because Jam's Grandad's greenhouse hasn't been touched for a couple of years and it was completely jammed with grapevines. A massive trunk grows up through the greenhouse, along the top on the inside and out and around the top on the outside. It looked like a bit of a mission to get sorted and was quite a task that took Jam a lot longer than he had planned. (As do most of his missions but that's another story for another time...) How amazing though to actually see inside the greenhouse and marvel at the fact that we actually have a greenhouse, how very grown up!

What to do with the grapes though? There are so many and neither of us have the first clue about wine making. Jam has made cider in the past and we both made some sloe gin last year with sloe's from our boating neighbour's M&M who had gone on a mission down the river Lea especially for them, delicious stuff it is too, me having my first wee taste of it last week, ooh what a treat!

We looked up 'how to make wine' on the internet and found various solutions and then realised we were in the middle of nowhere and needed to acquire all this special equipment to do the task. A neighbour gave us a large barrel to ferment it in and Jam found a health food store in Wellington that funnily enough has a home brewing section. It's rather pricey for the stuff but seeing as though the grapes had been harvested we didn't think we had much choice. I did go off on a mission to find somewhere in Taunton selling the kit but had no joy so the health food shop it was.

Right now Jam is crushing the grapes, thankfully NOT with his feet, we were thinking of letting Rowan crush them, but I'm not sure he's strong enough yet! We're building him up though to defend himself against the country hooligans! And, as I'm sure you're wondering, he is doing just fine, his little face has healed nicely and he's laughing the whole thing off and we've found another group to go to with children the same age as him!

'Ooh I could crush a grape' ~ am I showing my age there? Or strange sense of humour / memory for remembering something like that from the Crankies! Well, it's late, everyone goes to bed around 9 down here, so I ought to get some sleep and update on the next stage of the wine making another day. Jam has just come in saying he's got at least a gallon so far, and that's only half the grapes, and added 'I've got quite a good method too' sounding rather pleased with himself, then proceeded to explain his method, likening it to milking a cow, so on that note I think I shall turn in and look forward to the strange dreams of cows producing wine and such likes ~ oh now wouldn't that be fine, cow's producing wine!!