It’s been a busy week, somehow – one night thinking the witchling might have caught swine ‘flu, and one thinking it was chickenpox (it’s neither – don’t know what, but there’s something not quite right; at the moment I’m assuming teeth…), work work work, sticking copious quantities of stewed fruit in the freezer for easy whip-outs for the witchling, and making wine courtesy of the vast quantities of honeysuckle blossoms out in the hedge behind the house. I think I already mentioned the fact that honeysuckle is poisonous if you get any part other than the in-full-bloom flowers; we were pretty thorough, but I still have a feeling that we may be brewing the Drink of Death, or something similar. It was a ridiculously bucolic occupation, though, and the flowers smell just divine (as do your fingers, once you’re covered in the sticky nectar that, I presume, gives honeysuckle its rather appealing name).

It’s one of my favourite parts of wine-making – the smells you get throughout the process. Particularly when you’re making flower wines: the initial light wafts of blossom are just delectable, and when you get on to the first musty yeastiness of the fermentation, that smell takes me right back to my early childhood, when my mother whacked out some fairly blinding plum and elder wines. Let’s face it – anything involving a bowl full of flowers and an end result which includes free alcohol is going to get my vote. Even if it does take me rather a long time to get around to drinking what we make.

And of course some things are probably better left undrunk… it seems you don’t need toxic ingredients to produce something pretty unholy – yesterday’s trip to the top shed, in which we store most of our alcoholic output (and, I discover, some bottles of this and that that we bought during a trip to France in preparation for our wedding in 2005 – I either need to drink more, or we need to buy less, or something) resulted in the fetching of a most unpleasant concoction housed in a demijohn. The label has pretty much disintegrated so I can’t be 100% certain, but I feel fairly sure that the woeful contents are either our first stab at a straight red wine, courtesy of some friends with about thirty pounds of grapes they didn’t want, or the rather unusual-sounding mulberry wine we managed to make from the single picking that said friends’ tree yielded while we were round there relieving them of the grapes. Either way, it ain’t clever, and it certainly ain’t funny; at this stage, I’m contemplating whacking in some more yeast and, say, half a bottle of blackberry cordial to see if we can improve upon what tastes at present fairly like lighter fuel (only perhaps marginally less pleasant).

Fortunately, I have rather more certainty when it comes to elderflower wine; the photo shows half of this year’s batch, which now totals eight demijohns, or forty bottles. I’m also hoping to have another go at a combination of elderberry and blackberry; I managed, quite accidentally, to create a brew of heavenly taste a few years back, just by using up a few leftover berries and slinging them in a vat together. I didn’t write the quantities down. Oh no. Not for the likes of me, that whole planning or recording malarky. Ahem. It’s always the way, though, isn’t it? The things you write down taste of washing-up liquid, and the things you don’t turn out like manna from above. Of course, now that I’ve said that, the whole bloody lot will turn out vile, but hey – I like to live life on the edge. Note the elegant interior decoration combination of demijohn window dressing and kitchen table (saw). That pretty much sums up our house at the moment, come to think of it.