Just opened a bottle of two year old homemade Blackcurrant wine...it'd be good to declare it delicious and pour out a bigger glass...but it's horrid.
It certainly smells lovely...has the proper sort of aroma of compost heap and sweaty sock...just tastes horrible. And there's a dozen bottles of it...
There's Red Currant wine as well...had a sip of that and I believe it might be even worse than the Blackcurrant...
One year I made one of those concoctions where you stuff stoned fruit into a jar and top it up with Brandy...Teresa picked out all the Apricots and the Cherries then promptly fell asleep at the table before the pudding...
Another year we found a heap of Wheat by the side of the road...brought some home and made Wheat wine that was actually very drinkable...and terribly potent. It had to be rationed out in tiny liqueur glasses otherwise visitors were flat on their backs giggling... waving their feet in the air and talking rubbish.
All the staid maiden Aunts had slipped off this mortal coil by then...pity really...all manner of family secrets may have come to light, had we given them a small dainty glass of the infamous Wheat wine...
My Granny made wine...Blackberry, which was a rich dark red, that she gave us when we had a sniffly cold...heated with a red-hot poker held in the fire and sweetened with honey...Cousin Ginny developed such a taste for Granny's wine she used to make a big performance of coughing and blowing her nose...until Granny cottoned on and said she'd have to go home early if she was going to be ill.
And she made Dandelion and Burdock...we had a glass of that with our supper...made the boiled fatty Mutton stew much easier to swallow. Granny had Jack Russell dogs who were as broad as they were long...they must have put on pounds in weight when we all stayed on holidays, from the scraps we fed them under the table...you had to be quick though in case Granny saw you.
Grandpa would just wink at whichever one of us was the guilty party...
We were never actually hungry, in spite of giving most of our suppers to the dogs...Granny was a great believer in midnight feasts...she'd make up jam sandwiches and slices of fruit cake...little windfall apples, sweet and crisp... and a jug of either Lemonade or Dandelion and Burdock...
But I'm digressing yet again.