Guide
Country wine, or hedgerow wine, is wine made from whatever the garden and hedgerow provide instead of grapes. This is everything I wish someone had told me before my first demijohn: the kit you actually need, the basic method, what all the little additives do, what to pick each season, and how to fix the things that go wrong.
The idea is simple. Grapes are just fruit with a convenient balance of sugar, acid and tannin. Take any other fruit, top up whatever it lacks, add wine yeast, and you get wine. Elderflower, blackberry, plum, rhubarb, gooseberry, even dandelions and parsnips: the old country wine tradition turned a glut of almost anything into bottles for the year ahead.
It is also one of the cheapest hobbies going. The fruit is often free if you are willing to pick it, sugar costs pennies, and once you own the kit each new batch costs very little. That is why I started making it about seven years ago, and the kit from my first batch is still in use.
A one gallon (4.5 litre) starter setup runs about £25 to £50, or up to £100 or so if you want the bells and whistles, and covers everything below. Most of the shops on our where to buy page sell it as a bundle.
On the ingredients side: your fruit, ordinary white sugar, a sachet of wine yeast (my recipes mostly call for Lalvin 71B or EC-1118, but honestly any general purpose wine yeast does the job, and I buy whatever is cheap), yeast nutrient, pectolase, and usually a little acid blend and wine tannin. Campden tablets are optional but cheap insurance. More on what each one does below.
Country wine recipes read like a chemistry set the first time. None of it is complicated.
Grapes bring all of this naturally. Most other fruit is low on fermentable sugar, short on the nitrogen yeast feeds on, and out of balance on acid and tannin. The additions just top the fruit up to where grapes would be. Pectolase deserves a special mention: fruit is full of pectin (it is what sets jam), and without the enzyme to break it down you get a wine that never quite clears. Bakers yeast will ferment, but a proper wine yeast ferments cleaner, further and settles better, and sachets cost very little.
Half the pleasure of country wine is that it follows the year. This is roughly how the British seasons break down for a wine maker.
Usually one of four things: the must was too hot when you pitched (wait until it is below 25°C), the room is too cold (move it somewhere warmer), the yeast was old, or you used juice with preservatives in it. Re-pitch a fresh sachet once the cause is fixed.
A stuck fermentation. Check the temperature first, then add a dose of yeast nutrient and give the demijohn a gentle swirl to rouse the yeast. If the gravity is already low it may simply be finished.
If you skipped pectolase, that is almost certainly a pectin haze; you can add pectolase after the fact and wait. Otherwise, time and a cool spot clear most wines on their own, and finings will finish the job if you are impatient.
Young country wine almost always does, elderberry especially. This is what ageing is for. Bottle it, hide it from yourself, and try it again in six months. It is a genuinely different drink.
Stressed yeast. Rack it off the sediment promptly and the smell usually blows off as it ages. Next batch, use nutrient from the start and keep the temperature steady.
Air and bacteria got in. There is no way back from proper vinegar, so this one is about prevention: sanitise everything, keep demijohns topped up so there is little air space, and make sure the airlock always has water in it.
These are my own country wine recipes, free to read and clone, each with full ingredients, method and target gravity:
Or browse everything in the country wine section.
Fermentation takes a few weeks, but the wine itself needs months. Most country wines are drinkable at 3 months and noticeably better at 6 to 12. Elderberry in particular rewards a full year.
Most recipes land between 10 and 13% ABV, similar to grape wine. The strength comes almost entirely from the sugar you add, so it is very controllable. Take a gravity reading before you pitch the yeast and our free ABV calculator will tell you where you ended up.
Yes, and it often helps. Freezing bursts the fruit cells, so frozen and thawed fruit gives up its juice and flavour more easily than fresh. It also means you can pick through the season and brew when you have enough.
They are cheap insurance. One crushed tablet per gallon, 24 hours before you pitch the yeast, knocks back the wild yeasts and bacteria that came in on the fruit. Plenty of people skip them and get away with it. Plenty of people skip them and make vinegar.
No. Wine fermentation cannot produce anything dangerous to drink. The worst outcomes are a wine that tastes bad, has gone to vinegar, or picked up an off smell. Unpleasant, but not harmful, and most faults are avoidable with clean equipment.
Nothing, really. 'Country wine' is the traditional British name and 'fruit wine' is the more literal one. Both mean wine made from something other than grapes.
Demijohn Journal keeps your recipe, gravity readings and notes in one place, and works out the ABV as you go. Free, in your browser.
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