I bottled our rhubarb wine tonight. It was a fairly simple recipe:

• 1.5kg Rhubarb
• 1.25kg Sugar
• 1 small tin of grape concentrate
• bakers yeast

I managed to get just over 5 bottles. I'll give it a few weeks to begin to mature before tasting.

On a related note, I've ordered an electric juicer. This should make future wines easier to make. It's blackberry season at the moment and hopefully I'll have time to go and pick some soon. A friend with a grapevine has promised to give us a load of grapes, so the juicer will definitely come in handy there.

Apricot Wine
It was drunk at room temperature rather than chilled but it was good. Quite light flavoured but you could make out the apricot taste. If I tried it again I might try more apricot or leave the dried apricots to soak for longer.

Jam Wine
Quite light in flavour. Served chilled it worked well as a mixer. Tried it with white rum (ok), gin (worked well), Tropical Sourz (worked well) and Grenadine (just seemed to make it taste sweeter).

Berry Wine
This is the strongest flavoured of our wines so far, and with (in my opinion) the right balance of sweetness and depth of flavour. Also works well in a turbo purple

• 600g of dried apricots.
• 500g pears.
• 1kg sugar.
• 1 small tin of white grape concentrate.

Wash the fruit in a dilute sodium metabisulphite solution, then chop and put into a large pan. Add the sugar, cover with water and bring to the boil. Turn off the heat and leave to cool.
Pour into a sterilized fermentation bin. Add 1tsp of pectin enzyme, 1tsp of yeast nutrient and the yeast. Leave for a few days, occasionally mashing the fruit to get more juice out. Strain into a demijohn, add the grape concentrate and top up to 1 gallon with water. Fit the airlock.

When the fermentation has stopped (or the wine has reached the desirable sweetness), add some wine stabiliser. The wine will need to be clarified either by adding finings or syphoning into a 2nd demijohn and leaving to settle. Or both if the wine is quite cloudy.

Tonight was the party to drink the rest of the Biology Society homebrew - this was made in december and the first party (where about half of the beer got drunk) was last month.

As well as homebrew, we also tried 'turbo purple' - this was inspired by the drink served at the real ale festival, where they used strong lager, cider and blackcurrent wine. We used homebrew lager, a bottle of strongbow, and our blackberry and elderberry wine. It tasted fine.

Berry Wine

This used the berries we collected in the autumn, along with some plums to increase the fruit level to around 3½ pounds.

• 2½ pounds elderberries
• ½ pound blackberries
• ½ pound plums

The fruit was washed in a metabisulphite solution before being boiled in a pan with 4 pints of water and 1kg of sugar. The mixture was poured into a fermenting bin to stand for a few days. 1 teaspoon each of pectin enzyme, yeast nutrient and brewing yeast were added. The fruit mixture was then sieved into a demijohn, a tin of grape concentrate and water was added to take it to 1 gallon.
After a few weeks a thick sediment had formed so the liquid was syphoned into a clean demijohn and the volume was topped up with water - actually 200g sugar dissolved in water because the mixture was tasting too 'dry'.
A month later and fermentation had stopped. The wine was tasted and seemed ready for bottling. Wine stabiliser was added. After leaving to settle for a few more days, the wine was decanted into clean sterilised bottles. It's supposed to have several months to mature but I think I'll try a bottle over Christmas.

Jam Wine

This was more of an experiment. I used 3 jars of jam to provide the sugar and fruit content (plum, blackcurrant and strawberry jams), and added 2 teaspoons of pectin enzyme. No extra sugar was added and I used bakers yeast instead of brewers yeast to stop the alcohol content getting too high. Unfortunately I only got 4½ bottles out of it because so much sediment formed in the demijohn.