Has anyone ever made their own wine?

[AintNobodyHereButUsChickens]

Our strawberry patch has gone crazy and we're about to be overrun with strawberries. There's only so many we can give away before people start begging us to stop!

I thought about having a go at making strawberry wine! How difficult is it? What would I need to buy? I don't know what else to do with them all, I can't stand jam otherwise I'd make vats of the stuff!

Demijohns, sanitiser, yeast, hydrometer, sugar ... finings. (Wilko should have all that)

Patience.

Maybe subscribe to a homebrew forum ?

www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/

I've homebrewed from kits and would liked to have done it from fruit by the amount we drink is so miniscule it would simply be too much.

I don't think it is difficult to make wine so long as you have everything you need. Would strawberry wine be too sweet though? My ddad used to make wine. I wish I had taken more notice at the time. I plan to make some one day but probably not strawberry.

Wine can be made by accident - ask the hungover elephants that deliberately seek out fermenting fruit

If a wine is too sweet you can blend it with a drier wine (which happens more than some think).

It's weird to think that the UK is only starting to reach the levels of wine production seen over 100 years ago. One of those "you wouldn't have thought" facts. And English wine - the few bottles I've tried over the years - is actually bloody nice. And I say that as someone who grew up with a wine glass in my hand .

We've got an old grape vine in the garden and tried making wine for a few years in a row and then gave up. We didn't have anywhere to store it while it was fermenting, so the demijohns would just stand around in the kitchen getting in the way for months. (Got all the stuff I needed from Wilkinsons...as the person said above, they have a very good home brewing section)

You have to start it off in a bucket, then later siphon it off into demijohns...then later siphon it off into different demijohns...then eventually siphon it off into bottles...and it's probably just because I'm clumsy, but every time I did that there was just dripped wine and mess all over the kitchen.

Then at the end of it all the wine was never actually very nice.

Having said that, it was fun I suppose. And you will probably be a lot better at it than I was. I would say it isn't at all difficult, it's just messy!