To Put Away Childish Things #25

If this entry becomes gradually more rambling and incoherent then the reason may be that a more appropriate title would be "To put away not so childish things and then pick them up again much later and drink them."

Bit of a mouthful though so I stuck with the more generic version.

See? Rambling and incoherent already and I've hardly begun.

Those of you who are following the plot will realise that I am planning to leave the country and as a preface to that it's necessary to get the house ready for sale, and as a preface to THAT it's necessary to clear out an awful lot of stuff accumulated over my lifetime. 

Part of today's task was to tackle some of the stuff in the loft. In one corner of the loft there are barrels, demijohns and all the related paraphernalia of home brewing and home wine making. That was no great surprise. I knew it was there. What was a surprise was the opposite corner where, behind some boxes, I discovered a rack with half a dozen bottles of home made wine. 

I used to be quite the dab hand at making both beer and wine. With beer I made lagers, bitters, stouts, pale ales and even had a go at a rather nice honey beer. It's wine that gets really creative though, wine that let's you stretch your imagination.

Oh I started with grapes. It seemed the right place to begin. Over the years that I was doing it I made wine from elderberries an oranges, carrots and plums, apples and dandelions, gooseberries and parsnips, pea-pods and rhubarb. It's possible to make wine, admittedly not always palatable, out of almost anything that's not actually poisonous. I even made some out of a tropical fruit juice blend sold as Um Bongo.

The thing is though that I last made any wine about thirty years ago, so the bottles I've found in the loft have been there, gathering dust for at least that long. There are a couple labelled as "carrot", a couple labelled as "orange" and a couple of mystery bottles with no labels at all.

It's to one of the unlabelled ones that I owe my gradually deteriorating faculties this evening. Having found them it seemed silly not to open one and check out if it was still drinkable. It is. Very drinkable. A very palatable dry white. Parsnip, if I'm not mistaken. I had forgotten just how potent I made my wines. It tastes more like drinking strong spirits but it's very nice for all that. I expect it will give me a headache tomorrow

And now, I shall go and pour another glass, pop on the DVD - I am watching all of the episodes of Sharpe that I bought for my father and that he never got to watch - and consider which bottle to open next.