Plum wine and alder catkins

Brought some junk up from the cellar this morning and the last four bottles of homemade wine from Oxfordshire days. This one is plum. Toad put it in the fridge but I'm afraid it might turn the milk sour so I've moved it to a corner of the outhouse. The concrete floor should keep it chilled. Toad thinks it would go well with lemon drizzle cake. Hmm. I'm actually planning to make almondy marmalade shortbread this weekend.

I did a run to the dump with the junk plus some dug out fuchsia roots. If you lie those down on wet ground here (and it's very rarely not wet at least in part; at the moment it's sodden) they shoot out more roots and bed themselves down. Next thing you know you've got another unwanted giant fuchsia trying to take over the world. Anyway, on the way back I stopped off to check the lochside alder trees: the catkins are opening.

Marigold Wine and nostalgic jam pots

The marigold wine is not quite as clear as the carrot & apricot (it should have been decanted; we'll remember with the next bottle) but it tastes wonderful. It seems I made it a sweet wine. I wish I could find my wine-making notes. They are in the previous 'inner' for this notebook case that I bought in Florence seventeen or eighteen years ago, and they were very detailed: what yeast I used, how much sugar added, how long fermented, and so on. The current inner has mostly botanical notes.

my Florentine notebook cover

DivingDaughter came over from Edinburgh for a  couple of Christmassy days and she brought me some posh jam which caused a bout of sweet nostalgia.

It may seem for small pots of jam to cause nostalgia so here's the story. When my dad was very ill with lung cancer and we were still living in Oxfordshire, I would drive up to Poulton-le-Fylde on as many weekends as I could manage in my trusty old car, Diggory. Diggory had a personality and is remembered fondly by DerbyshireDaughter and DivingDaughter. He was still around and chugging along nicely when Toadlet was born. The photo below is of her with Diggory, or Diggory Old Bean, as I used to say when he was being temperatmental, as in: "Come on, Diggory Old Bean!"

Diggory continued chugging along for another five years after this photo was taken. Eventually we had to take him to the car graveyard, not because of engine failure, but because the cost of repairing the rusting chassis was going to be too much. At some point after this photo I tied a piece of string round two bits of the front grille to stop a rattle. It stayed there to the end, as did various bits of Blutak inside stopping more silly rattles.

What connection does this have to my dad's last illness? Well, on my Friday evening drives up north I would stop at a service station somewhere in the middle of the four-hour drive and have a scone with butter and jam and a pot of tea. I never used the whole of a motorway service station pot of jam so I'd bring them away with me and put them in Diggory's glove compartment. I always meant to take them into the house and use them up, and I think that sometimes happened, but they also accumulated in the glove compartment. Somehow the wee pots of jam in the glove compartment became part of Diggory's personality. And after my dad died, it would have seemed wrong, somehow, for there not to be a few small pots of jam in Diggory's glove compartment in memory of my dad.

Hey, Dad.

Wine from the Boggy Brae cellar part 2

an illustration of my carrot & apricots wine's viscosity

My 2004 Carrot & Apricot wine, bottled in July 2006, turned out good ten years on, and not just for the colours. Its high viscosity confirms its high alcohol content and it tasted good, in a 'robust' kind of way (Toad said "soft peach holding a war club" and, when he'd had a bit more "like maraschino cherries–full metal jacket variety"). We drank some with pasta and a carbonara type sauce made with Serrano ham and some smoked salmon but no Parmesan cheese. That was good too.

colours of carrot & apricot wine

Next for trial is some Marigold wine.

Wine in the cellar

Toad and I went down into the cellar yesterday. He was looking for a sheet of glass that he uses in some way for his painting projects. He's planning to paint a portrait of me when he can get a decent photo in decent daylight. Decent daylight tends to be in rather short supply at this time of year. He found his glass and he proceeded to paint it brown. No, I haven't any idea why either.

Anyway, I'd forgotten just how much of my home-made wine was down there. I had a winemaking stint when we lived in Oxfordshire and I had an allotment that was surrounded by berry bushes. We'd drunk most of the good stuff by the time we moved here so what's left has been sitting there for a decade in the hope it would improve with time. Toad brought up a bottle of apple wine and drank some of it quite happily. I had a sip and decided time had not improved it.

I suppose I could clear drains with it. Some of the colours are nice.

We also stored water down there because for the first couple of years here, until Scottish Water got its act together and replaced rotting Victorian pipe work along the peninsula, the number of times our water supply was off while they dealt with leaks all along the road was repeatedly inconvenient.

Electricity was off far too often too. That has also improved since power lines were laid underground instead of along parts of hillside with difficult access. The picture below was taken across the field next to the Boggy Brae one December day about six years ago. Those power lines are no longer there.

My reason for going into the cellar was to bring up some things that could be thrown out, like boxes of paperwork that we no longer need to hang on to. In parts of the cellar I can stand up, so long as I don't mind cobwebs in my hair. But if I want to walk about I have to duck to avoid joists and a muckle great metal beam that goes under half the house.

Steps down to the cellar and some bright green showing up during a short period of brightness between sleet showers this morning.