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.

The Wetherspoons pub chain is trying to break the world record for the most people at a wine tasting. They are having simultaneous wine tastings at all of their pubs throughout the country.

We went along for our free tasting (a tiny 50ml glass) and stayed to eat. The actual wine tasting was a bit disorganised. It was a while before we managed to get our tasters. For a world record attempt, it was very low key, almost to the point of being half-arsed. The free samples were only their ordinary house wines, rather than any of the 'festival' wines.

They don't seem to handle the wine festivals as well as the beer festivals.They don't promote them as well and the staff don't always seem aware of what's on offer.

The Birmingham German Winefest started today, in Victoria Square. There are stalls selling German food and drink, with wines from most parts of the country. Unlike the rubbish sold in most supermarkets, most of this isn't sweet Liebfraumilch but proper stuff, with a wide range of whites (dry to sweet), reds, rose and sparkling wine.

I've never tried a german sparkling wine before so I bought a bottle of medium-dry sparkling reisling. It was sweeter than I am used to (mainly the excellent but very dry Lindaur) but it was impressive stuff. It's a mystery why supermarkets can't sell stuff like this. It was better than most Cava wines.

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.

We went to a Cheese and Wine night at Warwick University, jointly hosted by the Cheese and Chocolate and the Wine and Whisky societies.
There were 6 wines paired with 6 cheeses for us to sample, and 2 experts from shops in Leamington to talk about them. It was in interesting evening, the wines and cheeses varied in quality and flavour and some of the pairings were less successful than others but most of what was available was good. There was a particularly good blue cheese there, whose name escapes me but it was very soft and creamy. There was also a Warre's 10 Year Old Tawny Port which was possibly the star of the show as far as the wines were concerned.

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.

This afternoon, we went to the Coombe Abbey country park, to get out of the city for a relaxing few hours. On the way out, we stopped at Far Gosford Street to take a look in Gosford Wines (we've seen the place advertised and were intrigued by it's claim to £2 wines so we had to take a look. We bought a few bottles of various beers and wines including 3 of the £1.99 wines).

Coombe Abbey itself is mainly landscaped gardens with a lake (complete with ducks). It's surprisingly popular and there were a lot of families there. We had a wander around then found a patch of grass to lie down and read the newspaper. It was a bit windy but we also managed to have the obligatory game of frisbee - it involved a bit of running around to retrieve it when the wind caught it.

I also thought this would make a good opportunity to try out the camera on my new phone - the image quality is so much higher than the old phone, as can be seen by comparing the examples below with some of the photos taken with my old phone (such as this one).

(Tonight, we tried two of the £1.99 wines - a red and a white. They were ok, a bit light on flavour but there was nothing bad about them, so good value really).