Wild Wines 

Time – 4 hours

Lunch Inc – Yes 

Location – East Sussex

A foraging walk and discussion about what you can make wine from.

Collecting desired fruits or leaves, berries or vegetables as the base product.

Learn how to steep and brewing techniques.

What equipment is required and how to use it.

Sterilisation methods and best practice.

Bottling and Corking

Storing & Drinking

At the end of the day, it’s the joy in our lives that really matters. The joie de vivre, as the French say. Nothing sums this up quite like the chink of wine glasses between friends and the first sip of chilled wine as the sun sets on a beautiful summer’s evening or the rich berry flavours of a ruby red wine sipped beside a crackling fire on a winter’s night.

The resilient life is a joyful life. Maybe this stems from the interconnectivity between ourselves and the wild things that become part of our immediate world. We take on a different world view when we start to fend for ourselves from the land that we roam on. We become aware of the seasons in a different way, not just for their heat, rain, coldness, light and darkness, but we see how the subtleties of our micro-climate and the weather in any one season affects the forage and hedgerows and thus the food and drink in our pantries.

Blackthorn blossom veils the hedgerows with a creamy white lace from early April and often before any leaves have appeared on the trees. Late in May the Hawthorn blossom, or May blossom, bursts into flower and the hedgerows are once more adorned with a spray of virginal whiteness. Beautiful as these blossoms are in the spring, the wild winemaker will be thinking of the fruits of the hedgerows to come several months on; the haws and the sloes with their iridescent red and blue fruits which are just some of the finest ingredients in the winemakers wild vineyard…the vineyard that we neither have to plant nor tend. From spring onwards the winemakers ingredients are all around; nettles, dandelions, gorse flowers and oak leaves are abundant in the spring, and through summer and autumn in the kitchen garden and orchard almost everything from gooseberries, plums and apples, to peapods and pumpkins can be used to make wine.

Of all the alchemies on the resilient homestead, wine making is perhaps the most magical. All you need is fruit, leaves or even roots, (such as beetroot or carrots which both make good wines), sugar, water and yeast. The sugar feeds the yeast during the fermentation process and produces alcohol and so the transformation of flavours and properties begins.

Drinking wine made from the land near where you live is rather different from drinking a bottle of cheap plonk from the supermarket. You control what has gone into it; it can be chemical-free and in our experience it has rather magical properties which promote all the pleasures of drinking wine and give you the most relaxing sleep experience. This, of course, is not a medical fact, just an experiential one!