Some of the greenie ideas make sense...

[neil_bolton]

My girlfriend, whom works for the Soil Association, has been enlightening me on the joys of fully sustainable growing, and all that comes with it. I'm finding it rather fun becoming more educated about where my food comes from and how its produced (The Soil Association is predominantly based around certification of Organic food and products).

However, she's not a raving lentilist (thank goodness), and enjoys fast cars, good honest food (including lots of meat) and drinking far too much just like the rest of us.

Imagined my joy when she sent me a link to one of the first small scale growing project I could get behind...

http://islingtonnow.co.uk/?p=1835

Thing is, I'd probably find I'd need that 385 sq/m to supply just my own wine requirements - still, ace fun finding out

Anyone else on PH do this sort of thing?

[stackmonkey]

There's at least a few PHers, including me, who are home brewers. Mainly country wines rather than growing our own grapes, but then we go hedgerow picking etc.

[Mobile Chicane]

I have a grape vine, but this is for table grapes / snail food rather than 'wine' grapes. However Denbies is just down the road, and their Juniper Hill white is rather good.

I prefer to leave these things to the experts since I wouldn't want to waste good ingredients with botched attempts at winemaking.

But I do make my own mulberry vodka and sloe gin, and am presently having a go at beech leaf noyau (see my blog).

[prand]

Flippin brilliant idea this.

I just got an allotment from my local council which is about 150sqm, and I'm already figuring out where I could put a couple of runs of vines amongst the potato and onion patches. I would love to be able to make my own wine, mainly as an experiment, to get close to the process and see how its done, but also, of course to make my own alcohol!

Any ideas on best grapes for our "temperate" climate, and where to get the vines from?

[Don]

Basically any vine that does OK in Northern France could be a goer in Southern England / Wales.

http://www.englishwineproducers.com/grapes.htm

Most English red wine ain't so great IMO. But we do crisp, summer drinking white wines really quite well.