This year’s batch of strawberry wine started life early one morning in mid April when we headed about an hour south of Atlanta to our favourite pick your own farm. There was a slight chill in the air when we started but we soon warmed up as we filled half a dozen buckets with ripe red berries.

I have been making this strawberry wine recipe for many years. It is a beautifully coloured, fragrant, dry rosé that is delicious when lightly chilled and retains a delicate aroma of strawberries.

The recipe comes from my well thumbed copy of “The Complete Book of Home Winemaking” by H.E.Bravery, which dates from 1979 and is a book I have been using for over thirty years, having started my home winemaking career at a rather young age. H.E.Bravery was a prolific author on the topics of home wine and beer making, publishing many books, primarily in the 1960s, such as “Home Brewing Without Failures” and “Home Booze: Complete Guide for the Amateur Wine and Beer Maker”. Some of his writing now seems a little dated, especially as a lot of the science and equipment used in home beer and winemaking has moved on since he wrote his books but many of the fundamentals are still sound.

This recipe uses what Bravery calls “the Campden method” as it uses Campden tablets, small pills of sodium metabisulphite, which are added to the fruit at the start of the process, killing the wild yeasts and bacteria which could otherwise affect the fermentation process and spoil the flavour of the wine.

I normally make this wine in a one gallon batch but as that produces a mere six bottles I decided to go large this year and make a five gallon batch, so we can enjoy the taste of summer for a lot longer. It does mean a lot more cleaning and sanitising work when it comes to bottling it but it is worth it once you have a good stash of rosé in your cellar.

The recipe below is for one UK gallon (160 fl.oz).

Strawberry Wine

From “The Complete Book of Home Winemaking” by H.E.Bravery

3lb strawberries

2lb sugar

5 fl.oz freshly made strong tea

1 Campden tablet

Wine yeast and yeast nutrient

Approximately 1 gallon of water

Boil the sugar in 3 pints of water for 2 minutes, and leave to cool.

Hull the strawberries and put them in a large food safe plastic bucket. You can get large plastic food containers from restaurant supply stores or plastic fermenting buckets from home wine making shops.

Crush the berries well by hand. I find a potato masher usually does the trick.

Add the tea and mix in half a gallon of water and one Campden tablet, crushed and mixed with two tablespoons of water. The addition of tea might sound slightly odd but it adds tannin into the equation, achieving a much better final result.

Add the cooled sugar / water mixture.

Add the wine yeast and nutrient, cover and leave to ferment for 7 days, stirring daily. You can get wine yeast and yeast nutrient at any good home winemaking supply store. They can advise you on the best choice of yeast for the wine style you are making and the quantity of yeast and nutrient to add to your wine, depending on the quantity you are making.

After this, strain the wine. Cover it again and leave to stand for one hour. At this stage boil some water and allow to cool in case you need to top off the wine in the next stage.

Pour carefully into a gallon jar leaving behind as much deposit as you can. Fill up the jar with cooled boiling water to where the neck begins, fit a fermentation lock and leave it until all fermentation has stopped.

At this stage you can bottle the wine, siphoning it into sterilised bottles before corking them.

This wine is best drunk young. It will happily last for a year or two stored in the right conditions but it isn’t one to stash away in the cellar and pull out in ten years time.

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After gathering a bumper harvest of strawberries in the spring I turned to a handful of tried and tested jam and drink recipes to process the bulk of them, but I also had a go at something new: strawberry infused bourbon.

Most of the fruit infused liqueurs I make include some sugar but this time I simply filled a couple of jars with strawberries, added bourbon until the jar was full and then forgot about them for a couple of months.

By the time I came to strain them the strawberries had imparted a beautiful rosy pink hue and although the aroma was still unmistakably that of bourbon, my nose couldn’t help but detect a subtle fragrance of fresh strawberries as well. On the palate it was smooth and delicious with the delicate hint of strawberries balancing well with the bourbon base. I wouldn’t recommend using an expensive small batch artisan bourbon for this but use something half decent and drinkable.

All in all, a fine drink for early summer sipping but it was crying out for a suitable accompaniment. Having just picked up some Georgia pecans at my local farmers market I quickly whipped up a batch of buttered pecans to nibble while enjoying my new fruity tipple.

Buttered Pecans

This recipe is based on a buttered brazil nut recipe from “Sweets Made Simple”, from the wonderful folks at Hope and Greenwood

Ingredients

7oz pecans

8oz soft brown sugar

3oz unsalted butter

1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

2 fl oz water

Heat the oven to 350F. Put the pecans in a single layer on a baking sheet and put them in the oven for 10 minutes until toasty and aromatic.

Put the sugar, butter, cream of tartar and water in a heavy bottomed pan and place over a low heat, stirring until the sugar has dissolved.

Put a candy thermometer in the pan and bring the mixture to a boil without stirring and leave it cooking until the temperature hits 266F. Remove the pan from the heat.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Dip each pecan in the hot sugar mix to coat and then put on the baking sheet to cool. Leave for at least an hour before enjoying. If you don’t devour them immediately they will last at least a week in a cool place.

I often dream about growing more of our own food. We have a few modest raised beds in our back yard and plant a selection of vegetables every year but usually with limited success. I’m not sure if this is down to my limited gardening expertise or the voracious squirrels we share our garden with.

Our house is on a corner lot, and as well as decent sized front and back yards features a steep L-shaped bank at the front and side that was already planted with a selection of plants, trees and shrubs when we moved in. As they have matured they have become a constant maintenance challenge, with much pruning, trimming and in some cases uprooting needed to stop them from taking the place over. What little time I have to spend in the garden is often dedicated to this rather than nurturing edible crops.

Luckily, mother nature has intervened this year to give me something to eat and drink that doesn’t rely on my limited horticultural skills.

At the back of our garden are a few nondescript young trees that for years we paid little attention to. They gradually got bigger and last year for the first time we noticed a handful of berries on the trees. A quick bit of online research revealed that we were in fact the proud owners of five mulberry trees. Last year’s crop was small and we were beaten to the fruit by birds and squirrels. This year is a different matter, and the trees are dripping with loads of berries.

It is still a challenge to get the fruit before the critters do, and as the berries seem to ripen unevenly I have been venturing out each evening to collect all the ripe berries I can and then freezing them on a baking sheet until I got a big enough batch to experiment with.

Luckily, to augment the mulberry harvest I also have a fine crop of wild blackberries. Most years I get a pitiful crop from the cultivated blackberries that I planted myself but the brambles on a neglected piece of land at the back of my yard positively flourish.

With my modest mulberry harvest and the first of the year’s blackberries I made a small batch of shrub, a sweetened vinegar / fruit mix that makes a good base for both soft drinks and cocktails.

I  used a 50/50 mix of mulberries and blackberries, mixed in a jar and then lightly crushed in distilled white vinegar.

This mixture is left to infuse for a few days and then strained. The resulting liquid then has sugar added and is gently heated to yield a thick, sweet, sour, fruity concentrate that makes a refreshing drink when diluted with water or can be used to add a burst of vibrant fruit flavor to a cocktail.

Mulberry and Blackberry Shrub

Ingredients

8oz fresh mulberries

8oz fresh blackberries

1 cup distilled white vinegar

Granulated sugar

Place the berries in a glass or ceramic jar, crush lightly and add the vinegar.

Leave to steep for 4 days, stirring or shaking daily.

After 4 days strain the fruit. Then add the sugar: I use a 2:1 liquid to sugar ratio but you can adjust to your personal taste. After straining I had around 2 cups of liquid so I added a cup of sugar to it and then gently heated it in a pan over medium heat, stirring regularly until the sugar is dissolved.

Once the shrub is cool, bottle it and store in the fridge.