Wining and pruning

3rd quarter to new moon: 25th-31st
A dormant period; low sap

Winemaking, like so many things, sounds like it should be terribly complicated and difficult but actually is not. All right, a country wine might not suit the taste of a connoisseur interested in vintages and grape regions, but for cotters like us there's nothing wrong with a bottle of homemade wine (or several) to help you through the long dark winter.

The hardest part about making your own wine is actually the waiting, because as with conventional wines they do improve with age. Just this week I bottled up a batch of elderberry wine and, after a sneaky glass from the bottom of the demijohn, we were sorry to have to put it away to mature for at least the next six months.

We're also waiting on a batch of bramble wine to finish fermenting at the moment. My recipe book suggested that this one would be ready to drink by Christmas of the year it was made, but that has not been the case for us. This week it occurred to me that the recipe book was likely based on winemaking in southern England rather than central Scotland and blackberries could ripen up to a full month later here than they do down south, which would account for the delay. Anyway, it's almost ready now and I'm looking forward to enjoying some before we get started on this year's wines. The next batches I'm planning are some may blossom wine and birch sap wine which are very exciting prospects.

In other news, this week I have pruned our blackcurrant bush as per the Almanac's moon gardening guidance. I doubt we'll have enough currants for a batch of wine (although that would be great) but some jam or cordial is certainly on the cards.

Pruning is one of those areas that I'm not particularly knowledgable about and I'm never quite sure if I'm doing it right. I feel more confident pruning our roses since I've done it for a couple of years now, and because they're ultimately decorative so the stakes are lower. This is my first year pruning a fruit bush and I went quite cautiously, just taking off enough branches to leave the middle of the bush open and uncrowded. We shall see how it gets on. I was very conscious of the fact that blackcurrants fruit on second year growth, but I struggled to tell which branches had already fruited and which hadn't. Oh well. We learn through doing in this game more than anything, and I am still a beginner in so many ways.