Gorse – what a prick.

After all the excitement and anticipation over the last few months, I bottled my gorse wine tonight. Well… I transferred it from the demijohn into 6 wine bottles – but I didn’t put the corks in. It was awful.

Truth is, I’d been deluding myself from quite early on in the process that it was going to turn out alright. A nasty taste crept in during primary fermentation, and I kept hoping that it would work its way out. Even last week I snuck a taste and told myself it was ‘nice and earthy’.

But it wasn’t. It was just horrible. When it came to the crunch of asking myself ‘can I truly conceive of drinking a bottle of this stuff?’ the answer was a resounding ‘bleugh!’. So I poured it away.

Bloody stupid stinking prickly bastard gorse.

By the way, for the person who kept ending up at my blog via a search on ‘what colour are gorse flowers?’ – they are yellow.

I am a pincushion for country wine

I don’t know what possessed me. Perhaps I sensed that I had to do something pleasant and outdoorsy after spending an hour trying to kick-start an uncooperative CZ125 (in hindsight, I’m sure it was flooded after about the second minute. Anyway…..)

I spotted a flowering gorse, and was suddenly gripped by the desire to make gorse-flower wine. I’ve never tasted it; I wasn’t even sure I’d ever heard of it. So I ran inside to check whether such a thing existed. There wasn’t anything in the pocket edition of ‘Food for Free’ but there were plenty of references and a couple of recipes on t’internet.

5 pints of gorse flowers are required for a gallon of gorse wine. That’s 3 litres of flowers. It took about 90 minutes to gather the flowers off four different bushes. I’ve no idea how many hundreds of flowers that involved, but for each flower I picked, I was pricked at least once by the thorny bastard that is the gorse bush.

Once I’d gathered the first litre though, I stuck my nose in and was greeted by a sweet and heady aroma. A bit like walking past a honeysuckle bush on a summer’s evening, but milder. This delicious smell was my incentive to continue. I now have a gorse flower stew sitting, extruding in the fermenter. It smells incredible… in a few days I’ll add yeast and sugar to do their magic – and by the time I raise a glass in toast to the rugged, thorny bastard gorse bush, these prickles and invisible splinters will be a faint memory.

Hopefully the bird I scared out of the last gorse bush will have only a faint memory of Pip’s and my presence… just as I finished gathering, I glanced into the centre of the bush and saw a neat, round nest with 4 large-ish, blue eggs. I think it belongs to a blackbird, but I didn’t see the bird, and can’t find any egg descriptions in my 3 british bird books.

Things I could have been usefully doing…

… instead of staying up til 1am playing ‘who has the biggest brain’ on facebook:

- racking off kiwifruit wine
- sweeping kitchen
- finishing Bill Bryson book
- finishing Graeme Greene book
- finding panniers, bike lock, bike light etc to prepare for cycling to work in morning
- finishing off outstanding website work
- grabbing a guitar and sorting out half-written songs
- stretching
- sleeping

However, on the plus side:

- I’d had a productive day already
- I now apparently possess a 2801cc Squidlian brain
- I’m getting much better at dividing by 3

Pity in a way it’s not 2799cc, as that would make 3 neat compartments of 933cc each (but maybe I needed those extra 2cc to figure that out… um… yeah)

Culture Vulture

I have enjoyed three different cultural activities this evening.

I have a sourdough loaf rising in the proving oven, about to be moved into the proper oven… I think it’s going to be a bit heavy.

I have sipped on kefir (manky moo-juice as described by Harry… I prefer to think of it as probiotic super-food).

And I’ve juggled and siphoned and bubbled approximately 3 gallons of homemade wine into new demijohns – 2 gallons of kiwifruit and one gallon of pear. They’re all pretty potent and variously yummy. I think the pear is the nicest.