Homesteading Skills: Homemade Wine and Best Types of Trees

By John And Sally Seymour
Published on January 1, 1977
article image
by Unsplash/Moritz Knöringer

Ah, the vicissitudes of time. Two years ago, when there were no currently relevant small-scale-farming introductory handbooks available, many of us welcomed the publication of Richard Langer’s Grow It! with open arms. Now that we’re all older and more experienced, however, some folks find it increasingly easy to criticize that breakthrough beginner’s guide. Which brings us to another breakthrough book that is just as important (probably more so) now as Grow It! was two years ago . . . and which may well come up for its share of criticism in another 24 months or so.

Be that as it may, John and Sally Seymour’s record of 18 successful years on a shirttail-sized homestead in England is important now and should offer welcome encouragement to today’s back-to-the-landers . . . both real and imaginary. .–MOTHER.

Homemade Wine

Now ‘homemade wine’. Grape wine should be pure juice of the grape, with nothing added, and nothing taken away. This is because the ripe grape is very rich in sugar, has enough water in it so that it doesn’t need any more, and carries its own yeast spores on its skin ready to ferment it. But the ‘wines’ most country people make in Britain are really little more than solutions of sugar — ordinary beet or cane sugar (sucrose) in water, flavoured and reinforced with the juices of some fruit or vegetable, and fermented with added yeast.

I know a village in Worcestershire (a county of mighty wine-makers) in which at least three farm-working gentlemen have sheds in the bottoms of their gardens purely devoted to the making and drinking of wine. These three gentlemen share this in common: Half of their gardens are devoted to the culture of the rhubarb and the other half to that of the parsnip — their wives can whistle in vain for anything else. They each own two sixty-gallon barrels. In the winter they each brew sixty gallons of parsnip (this root should not be used until the frost has been on it) and in the summer sixty gallons of rhubarb. They are apt to ‘go on the barrel’ as they aptly call it, all gathering in the shed of one or other of them, and I have on occasion, ‘gone on the barrel’ with them. It is an experience.

We make elderberry (a glass a day, in the winter, keeps the flu away, and if it doesn’t then an occasional hot glass with a teaspoonful of honey in it, gets rid of it); elder flower, which is a most delicate wine, quite delicious and also, I believe, has therapeutic properties; blackberry, which is a full-bodied rather port-like wine; black currant, which is absolutely excellent; mead, which we make from the cappings of the honeycombs which would otherwise be wasted anyway; sloe wine, which is a very good port-like wine; and a few others. People make ‘wine’ out of absolutely ridiculous things: lettuces and tea leaves and hell knows what. This is simply fermenting sugar and water and flavouring it with some unlikely vegetable matter. Throw your pea-pods to the pigs, they’ll do far more good.

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