Home Brew - Country Wines

[stackmonkey]

As we seem to have home brew threads every so often on different types of alcohol. I'd thought I'd try and keep this one to wines.
What do you make?
How much of it?
Any decent tips to improve technique etc?

Recently bottled - 6 bottles of full strength elderflower champagne, using a 7th as top-up.
About to bottle - 5 gallons of damson.
On the go - 1 gallon of passion fruit, started from pure juice from cartons.

[kiteless]

I suppose we're lucky in that there's a good wine "larder" a couple of minutes away.

We've just started 2 gallons of cherry wine; next being Victoria Plum, followed by elderberry & blackberry. It's seasonal.

The main thing with fruit wines is always dose it with pectolase at the same time as you add the yeast.

[stackmonkey]

I love blackberry and elderberry; have some plum bottled in the garage, not had the chance to do cherry yet.

[stackmonkey]

Experimental wine No.4 - Blackcurrant leaf.

Yes, the leaf, not the fruit. It smells lovely and having seen a few recipes kicking around for a jelly based on it have decided to be brave.
I'm thinking/hoping it should turn out as a light and delicate wine, but with lots of aroma.

[stackmonkey]

Experiment 5 - Rowanberry.
Half and half mixed with eating apples as 'pure' rowanberry could be a bit too harsh and bitter.

accidental experiment 6 - Damson champagne!
Made a 5 gallon batch of damson wine in 2011
sulphite and sorbate added earlier in the year to stabilise.
12 bottles, bottled as dry
sugar added, 16 bottles filled as medium.

Last 2-3 days of heat in my garage have re-activated the yeast somehow and I've had 4 bottles blow their corks.
Preferring to salvage something, I've sterilised a load of champagne bottles collected and re-bottled the damson in those. They're currently propped upside down so the sediment collects at the cork end, so that I can do the freeze, de-sediment and re-cork thing in a few months.
Should be lovely!