How to make Homemade Country Wine
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Make homemade country wine with berries, flowers, and fruit. An introduction to winemaking including a strawberry wine recipe and rose petal wine recipe.

I feel fraudulent contributing to a series on homesteading. This phrase suggests rural living, aching muscles, and earth-covered hands. I live in a semi-detached house in suburban Leeds, and my wife is the gardener. This hardly fits the homesteading lifestyle. However, what I do – obsessively – is make my own wine.
If something sounds like it will make a tasty brew, and on occasion even if it doesn’t, I will pick it, crush it in my bucket, transfer it into my demijohns and drink it one year on. What I want to do in this post is to convince you that winemaking is actually easy, lots of fun, and far cheaper than buying from the shops.
Make Country Wine
For Christmas 1998, my wife bought me two demijohns (‘carboys’ in America), a plastic tube, other wine-making paraphernalia, and a book of recipes. She did not know what she had created. From making 12 bottles of wine in my first year, I now make about 180 annually.

I do at least one flavor a month, and during summer will make four or five. This June I will certainly do elderflower, gooseberry, rose petal, and possibly a ‘rhubarb and elderflower’ combination. In July I plan on strawberry, redcurrant, and blackcurrant. If anything else looks ripe and delicious, I will probably take that too.
Most books on wine-making open with long and intimidating chapters on equipment needed, fearsome dos and don’ts, how to measure specific gravity, and strict rules on storing wine. I am tempted to say ignore all that and just give it a go. The worst that happens is that you end up with something nasty, and whilst I have experienced this (potato wine being particularly memorable), it is an infrequent occurrence.

Country Wine Recipes
Wine Making Equipment
True, you do need to make an initial outlay to get the vital equipment – but ask around. Once people knew that I made wine, I had several offers of equipment from those whose fathers (curiously never mothers) had tried it in the 1970s.
What you need as a minimum is one large bucket with a sealable lid, two demijohns, a length of tubing, a rubber cork for the demijohns, and an air-lock. Anything else you are either likely to find in your kitchen (measuring jugs, wooden spoons, potato mashers) or is desirable rather than necessary (a hard plastic tube with a bund, a hydrometer). Here’s your shopping list:

- A large bucket with a lid
- Two demi-johns
- Length of clear tubing
- A rubber cork
- A rubber cork with a hole drilled through
- An air-lock for fermenting
- Measuring jugs
- Kitchen utensils: spoons, potato masher

Winemaking Ingredients
As well as equipment, you will need to get some consumables from a specialist brew shop. The minimum would be a sachet of yeast and a tub of sodium metabisulphite (for sterilizing purposes), but I also recommend yeast nutrient and pectolase. If recipes require tannin or citric acid, you can substitute (respectively) a mug of strong black tea or lemon juice instead.

Two summer wine recipes
The best way to show that winemaking is easy is to provide a recipe. As it is now summer (allegedly in this part of England) I have two for you: rose petal wine and strawberry wine. The first is unusual, but in a good way, and tastes of Turkish Delight.
The second is one of my very best and is unmistakably strawberry. Both recipes make six bottles. Two explanatory notes. My recipes use British measurements (where a pint is 20 fluid ounces). And at each stage, you need to sterilize the equipment being used, with Sodium Metabisulphite. For instructions click here.

Rose Petal Wine Recipe
Clip rose heads as they are just starting to fade. If you don’t have enough petals in one go, freeze the flowers until you have enough. Don’t worry if they go a little brown. Collect strongly scented roses of any color.
Ingredients
4 ½ pints / 11 cups rose petals
2 ½ lbs /1130g Sugar
Juice from one lemon
1-liter carton white grape juice (or similar)
6 ½ pints/3700ml boiling water
1 sachet Wine Yeast
1 teaspoon Yeast Nutrient
1 teaspoon Pectic Enzyme
- Put petals, sugar, lemon juice, and grape juice in a bucket
- Pour over boiling water
- Stir until sugar dissolves
- Leave overnight keeping bucket lid on
- Add yeast, nutrient, and pectolase
- Leave 5 (or so) days, stirring twice a day
- sieve liquid into your demijohn (a funnel will help), discarding petals
- fit rubber bung and air trap
- leave for 2 months (or so)
Method (second stage)
- siphon liquid from demijohn into the second demijohn, trying to avoid the sediment
- fill the gap in the second demijohn with syrup made from a ratio of 1-pint water: 6 oz sugar
- leave for 4 months (or so)
- bottle
- leave until a year from collecting ingredients (if you can!)
- drink

Strawberry Wine Recipe
Ingredients
4lbs/1815g strawberries
3lbs/1360g sugar
4 pints/2273ml boiling water
2 pints/1137ml cold water
1 sachet Wine Yeast
1 teaspoon Yeast Nutrient
1 teaspoon Pectic Enzyme
1 teaspoon Tannin (or a small mug of cold black tea)
Method (First Stage)
- Mash strawberries in a bucket and add sugar
- Pour over boiling water
- Leave 24 hours
- Strain liquid into a demijohn using a sieve, putting strawberry pulp into a large pan
- Pour cold water over strawberry pulp, letting it sit for an hour or so
- Pour strawberry liquid from demijohn back into the bucket
- Strain liquid in pan into a bucket, discarding the strawberry pulp
- Add yeast, nutrient, pectolase, and tannin
- Leave 5 (or so) days, stirring twice a day
- Pour liquid into a demijohn
- Fit rubber bung and air trap
- leave for 2 months (or so)

Method (second stage)
- siphon liquid from demijohn into the second demijohn, trying to avoid the sediment
- fill the gap in the second demijohn with syrup made from a ratio of 1-pint water: 6 oz sugar
- leave for 4 months (or so)
- bottle
- leave until a year from collecting ingredients (if you can!)
- drink
A year from making to drinking sounds like an age, but don’t let this deter you. Start others in the meantime – I recommend blackberry – and soon you will have a wine cycle going where you are always starting a new flavor as you open a fresh wine. Both making and drinking are an absolute pleasure, and I urge you to have a go.
Ben Hardy is on a mission to make a wine for each letter of the alphabet and is missing the letters F, I, J, L, M, U, V, W, Y, and Z. You can read all about his winemaking and drinking exploits in his blog and in his book ‘Ben’s Adventures in Wine Making’,  published by The Good Life Press. He has also written a second piece for Lovely Greens on the A-Zs of Country Wine recipes.
Hi.
In response to making a wine with every letter of the alphabet I wonder if you have ever heard of ‘Mahonia Berry ‘ I came across this bush last year by chance. They are very small dark blue
( almost like Sloes) . I collected some and I have about 12lb in my freezer. I too am new to wine making but also like to try everything I can re hedgerow food. Have you ever tried to make a wine from Mahonia Berry. I have tried to make some last year the same way elderberry wine is made but no luck don’t know what I did wrong
Kind regards
Steve
With this recipe I will now make my first batch of homemade wine from blackberries. Pretty excited! I just wonder if all of the ingredients should be doubled, even the yeast etc. if I make a double batch?
Good question! You could get away with using just one wine yeast packet if in a pinch. It may take longer for it to take though so if you can, use two packets.
I make a wine out of jam or marmalade 4 jars boil for 3 mins as yeast,pectolase, yeast nutrient 1kg of sugar and just top up with leave for about a month and it’s not bad
That sounds incredible!
I make mead using nothing but honey, fruit, bread yeast, and various spices. No sulphites, campden tablets, or anything else. They are ready to drink in just 3 months are delicious. :)
Homemade wine with natural honey could you send the recipe please.
Would love to make wine with natural ingredients.
Thx
Denise
This looks delicious Tanya! Thanks so much for sharing. Been scared to make my own wine at home – but this definitely makes it seem easier. Thanks for sharing!
Good luck with starting to make your own wine Billy :)
You have said to remove fruit after 24 hours before adding in yeast and nutrient etc. and you have also said add in these things then leave for 4 to 7 days then remove the fruit. Which is it? Or does it matter?
I am very new to wine making, So new that after messing up 2 wine kits, I’m not sure if this is the hobby for me.
But blazing on, I have gotten back to it with this recipe.
I’m wondering about sg readings. Are there base instructions that I’m overlooking? I am on day 5 and my sg is. 097. Should I worry about readings or just go to the next step regardless?
It also doesn’t mention adding any additives to it after you rack it to stabilize or stop it from fermenting more. Especailly if you add sugar to sweeten.
Sorry to be so needy, I just don’t want to mess this one up too, otherwise my husband may make me stop.
Ben, the guest writer for this post, is a winemaking author but it seems he doesn’t use Campden tablets at the end to stop further fermentation. I do though and would personally recommend it – I’ve had bottles pop their corks out before from the pressure that builds up.
As for specific gravity (sg), it’s most important to take it at the very beginning of making the wine (before fermentation but after all the sugar is added) and then again at the very end. Taking these readings will tell you just how much alcohol is in the wine percentage wise. On day 5 I wouldn’t bother, personally.
Looks attractive love to taste