I suddenly remembered my bucket of strawberry pulp and sugar, having left it for a week instead of a day, discovering a frothy brew which looked remarkably like strawberry milkshake. I am rather a forgetful winemaker and tend to leave things longer than I should.
With the wild berries barely a centimetre in diameter I guess an enthusiastic forager would need to spend an entire back-breaking day to collect enough for a gallon. I do not know if our own native strawberry - still commonly found - was ever made into wine, but considering their size I doubt it. In 1830 the Lord Bishop of Calcutta, no less, declared: Not that everyone appreciated strawberry wine. I have mentioned before my fondness for heroic recipes so I was delighted to find one from 1832 which tells you to "take two hundred baskets of good ripe fruit for a barrel, and sixty-four pounds of brown sugar … " and to add "fourteen gallons of good white rum". And they seemed to have made a lot of it. This coincides with the introduction from France of our modern cultivated strawberry - a hybrid of two species from the Americas. Strawberry wine has a long history in Britain, the earliest recipe I have found being from 1745. Many were lost to my two daughters (OK, and to me) but I managed to reserve enough to make a batch of wine. Overcome by the low prices at my local market, I bought a few kilos about three weeks ago. The warm, dry spring (now a distant memory) produced an early, bumper crop of very good strawberries.
With the rain covers starting their annual dance at Wimbledon, strawberry wine seems an appropriate subject for this week's post. The prettiest thing on my shelf at the moment is a swirling, fizzing, bubbling demi-john of nascent strawberry wine. Demi-johns are like aquaria – you can sit and watch them for hours - nothing much happens, but still they have a strange fascination.
Bottles containing interesting coloured liquids fill every shelf in the dining room and I am getting complaints about the amount of room my buckets and barrels, pipes and potions are taking up in the kitchen. M y house looks like Merlin's lair at the moment.
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