This has a beautiful dark-brown colour, with a gentle coffee odour.

Kopi-o — Malaysian black coffee — needs a little sugar when black to give it body, and in this case the unfermentable sugar is not enough to ruin the taste. Instead there’s a hint of bitterness in the middle, with a seductive coffee aroma towards the end, and a full-bodied taste.

I’d like to try this again, but with an alcohol-tolerant yeast and sugar added so that the sweetness is unfermented sugar in a relatively high-alcohol wine, so that it has something of the character of a liqueur.

One friend, who’s tasted a fair number of my wines, commented: “This is your best one yet”.

The elderberries give this a rich, deep purple colour.

The bouquet seems bland and unpromising. The taste tells another story. At the start of the there is an exciting tingling sensation on the tongue, with a quick hint of elderberry. At the end there’s the dry after-taste of sloes. Along the way is a succession of flavours. Damons and sloes are relatives, but the damsons have a different tartness, which appears in the middle. The succession of flavours happen against the rich backdrop of apple — almost as rich as the crab apple wine. The overall effect is a rich, fruity flavour that takes the mouth through a complex series of tastes, set off by a gentle medium sweetness.

Pale golden-brown colour, medium sweetness.

The bouquet puts me in mind of a good sherry.

The taste is clear and fresh despite the sweetness, as if the sharpness of the crab apples is working with the sugar. The effect is a bright sensation that tingles on the tongue. There is a hint of apple on the tongue and catching the nasal passages at the end of the taste, but for the most part the wine has a richness of its own which is distinct from the fruit. I have a penchant for sour fruit tastes, but one friend who disliked the apple wine (scrumble) for its sourness, spoke glowingly of this wine.

This is a recipe to repeat.

The colour is a very pale greeny yellow — it might have been more green had the nettles been picked at the start of the season. Nettles themselves have little smell, but the smell of the wine is reminiscent of cooked nettles, both in soup and tea. The wine is of medium sweetness and makes the edge of the tongue tingle. The nettle flavour appears in the middle of the taste, followed almost immediately by a nasal sensation of nettle. There is a slight hint of something unpleasantly metalic near the end. On its own, the wine gives me a sense of something missing, and I have a sense that it would be well complemented by a medium-strength cheese. Next time, I would be tempted to make it a little drier, but it holds my attention pleasurably as it is.

I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction when I shared this with some friends the comments went “It really does taste of nettles. It is lovely.”, with the bottle draining reassuringly rapidly. I was even more pleasantly surprised when a friend mentioned that a mutual friend had been enthusing about it... I must make some more in the spring!

A subtle bouquet with a hint of cinnamon. Despite the high amount of sugar (and consequent Og) the taste is quite dry. Damsons themselves have a dry feel in the mouth, so I wonder if the apparent dryness is this, rather than actual sugar levels. The flavour is strongly fruity, though curiously unlike the taste of damsons (or maybe it is just that I am used to how they taste after stewing with sugar). If I drink slowly, the dominant sensation is of the tongue almost being sucked dry, but, despite how it sounds, that is rather pleasant. Drinking more quickly, what passes is a series of fruity hints. The sense is of a complex taste which I could imagine in a lively conversation either with a gamey meat, or a sorbet. Despite the sense of dryness, I could also imagine this working well with a relatively heavy desert, like a crumble. The is a wine to make again, perhaps with a little more cinnamon.

When I am tasting a wine, I usually work on the basis of the first few sips, sensing that it makes sense to come to a view before the alcohol has an effect on my judgement. After writing the last paragraph, I’ve drunk most of the glass and realise that the cumulative effect is quite different from what I have just written, and feels more like a full-bodied red wine. This may simply be the effect of the tannin, but it is now feeling much richer, as if a little stilton would help it along happily (or it would help a little stilton rather well). Now my palette has softened — presumably with the effect of the alcohol — I am processing it more in the language of a rich port.

I must like this wine: I just grabbed a bottle to give to someone and realise it is my last one!

The idea was that a cider is a fermented apple juice: what happens if I ferment blackberry juice? Extracting th juice efficiently from blackberries turned out to be quite a hurdle, and I bought a masticating juicer just after this. In the end, I made up the full quantity with apple and crab apple juices.

The colour is a deep purple red. The bouquet seems dull and the taste begins as a passable red wine flavour with just a hint of something else in its acidic tartness, but then there is a rush of notes of blackbery both in the taste and aroma. The term “notes” usually implies a subtle hint: here it is a cascade of hints that make up someting very rich.

Making another attempt at this is appealing, but this year’s blackberry crop is not so good, so for 2012 I am heading in the direction of a much more subtle blackberry sparkling wine, whch will make the most of those subtle notes.

The first surprise of this wine came when I strained the must and found that the liquid was a pale yellow. It turns out that the red colour of the tomatos lies in their flesh. The second surpise is that there is little to connect the taste to tomatos. Instead there is a smell reminiscent of a medium sherry. The wine is medium-sweet, with a softness on the tongue. The beginning of the taste also gives the impression of a medium sherry, with some fruity notes towards the middle of the taste which form a rich contrast to the sherry-like smell that catches in the nose towards the end. The wine works well on its own, but would also complement something like a cheddar cheese.

This recipe could stand being repeated.

The wine has a deep red-brown colour.

On their own, rose hips often don’t proclaim their taste or odour until stewed into a rose hip syrup, which is at the heart both of the taste and bouquet of this wine.

The rich fruitiness gives an illusion of sweetness on this full-bodied wine. When I first tasted it I wondered whether I might have used too much rose hip, but on reflection like the depth of the taste. This is a long way from my previous attempt, where I’d used fleshy dog rose hips, which turned out to have more flesh than flavour, and end up adding ginger to boost the flavours the point that it made sense to call it a “ginger and rose hip” wine. The rose hips for this were taken from wild roses near Rhuallt village, which were quite firm when ripe, with relatively little flesh.

This is a recipe to repeat.

This is the wine where I think I did most damage by adding the unfermentable sugar. I was going to be very negative about it, but tried a Spanish rosé a few minutes ago, and now realise that my haw wine is more paletable than that. This may not be saying very much, except that maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh. I probably should try again but sweetening another way.

There’s a distinctive aroma of haw, related to the smell of haw tea. The taste has a sharpness that makes the tongue tingle before the cloying sweetness kicks in, followed ultimately by the dreaded saccharine aftertaste.

When I added the unfermentable sugar it was because the taste was a little too sharp. This was before I bought a pH meter, and I suspect that the pH was a little low, so making it a little less acid would have eased the astrinency, and I wonder whether the flavour would have softened in the bottle, removing the need to sweeten.

This wine has a vivid, bright red colour, with an enticing smell of raspberry in the bouquet.

This was my first attempt at a sparkling wine, and I made several mistakes. One was that the flavour was a little too sharp when it was ready to bottle, so I used some of the unfermentable sugar and almost ruined the taste with the saccharine. The second was to put a little more sugar in at the bottling stage than turned out to be needed, which leads to a wonderfully lively wine when it is poured, but also to more sediment than is ideal. The third was to leave the bottles standing upright, which meant that the sediment floated to the top in the early stages of fermentation and formed a plug. Having encountered that problem in the first bottle I opened, it was easy enough to (gently) invert the bottles to enable the plug to float free, but this does mean it, after pouring a few glasses, it was necessary to decant the wine, so it became cloudy.

Taste-wise, it is lively on the tongue, pleasantly acid in the middle, with an aroma of raspberry towards the end. To my taste, the saccharine undermines the flavour throughout, and leaves an unpleasant tang afterwards, but others seem to enjoy it, so the wine is not a complete disaster.

For next time... I am being careful to put the bottles of sparkling wines in the 2011 vintage on their side (and turn regularly), and have used a little less sugar. If I make a raspberry wine again it will either be a still wine, so it an be sweetened with sugar, or a sparkling wine with less fruit.