Another Life: Remembrance of wines past

The elder tree is now a high dome of blossom, foaming creamily against the flat blue of the sea. It has grown too tall for me to reach the flowers without bringing out the kitchen steps, which are getting old and wobbly, like me.

The branches of the elder join with arching hawthorn to make a shadowy, scented tunnel on my way to the other, plastic one, to water the tomatoes. Breathing in the perfume prompts a Proustian rush of remembrance for the elderflower wine of times past.

I came to our years of elective self-sufficiency with memories of my mother’s country skills and the sharp, potent smell of fermenting dandelion wine from an earthenware crock in the cupboard under the stairs. I had gathered the flowers from the churchyard up the hill, where they grew between the white and lichened tombs. Now fortified by raisins, they seethed towards consumption, in a tentative sherry glass, at Christmas.

In our first decades at Thallabawn making wines was clearly necessary for some reciprocal social life. But such delicious experiments need have nothing to do with poverty. The savour of our elderflower was regularly tested against the brew of the retired British ambassador to Moscow, dear Sir Terence Garvey, then happily building drystone walls at his cottage at the foot of the mountain.

Making “country” wine is really no more difficult than following any other kind of recipe, for which there are any number of books. Brewed in any quantity, however – and why not, once one has started? – the stirring, squeezing, straining and bottling involve considerable hard labour. “One” was, of course, Ethna, already well practised in cheesemaking and bread baking.

Her record vintage was of blackcurrant wine, brewed in a big vermilion plastic dustbin bought and sterilised for the purpose. A figure of 40 gallons in one go haunts her memory, of which the final dusty bottles were discovered in the shed 10 years later, still fulfilling their promise of a smooth, rich Madeira with just a hint of Ribena.

It took a decade or so to close the tantalising gap between annual consumption and a necessary maturity. But with rhubarb for rosé, gooseberry for hock, blackberry for Médoc, the cellar in the shed became a civilised adjunct for a life in wellies.

My job was harvesting and gathering. Much of this was on the acre if the gooseberry bushes were not shredded by sawfly or the ripe blackcurrants not pre-empted by the birds. Garden gluts, on the other hand, could suggest experiments, not all of them successful.

Parsley wine proved unexpectedly fine – a splendid dry white with a pleasantly herby finish – if sadly limited in quantity. Pea-pod wine, for which several books gave recipes, came nowhere near the same success. Promised as one of many garden “hocks”, it persisted in tasting irretrievably of pea pods and was eventually used to fortify other vintages in hopefully discreet amounts.

I missed the best garden wine, being away, on a three-month Arctic expedition, for the riotous summer parties at which it was enjoyed. This was a rhubarb that mysteriously failed to bubble in its initial carboy fermentation. Yet, started again, it must have attracted a passing wild yeast from the air that brought it to a sparkling, unrepeatable perfection. The evenings of a buoyant good humour it engendered are still remembered by our friends.

My harvestings beyond the gate risked a certain self-conscious tension.

Picking two kilos of blackberries for every gallon of wine could keep me at the local roadside briars for a whole afternoon. Every driver in a passing car lifted a hand in greeting, but I could feel them counting me, inevitably, as a blow-in with nothing more manly to do.

Gathering gorse flowers from bushes in a field towards the post office (when we still had one) left me similarly exposed.

Half a gallon of the golden, coconut-scented blooms for a gallon of wine, plucked among the prickles, left me with very tender fingertips and brewed a vintage with too much of a hint of my mother’s powder puff. Rowan berries, richly vermilion in early autumn, at least took me up a distant mountainside. Their brew made, you could say, a tangy sort of sherry that, once one had acquired the taste, came not disastrously far from Tio Pepe.

In a decadent old age, with many such energetic alchemies forgone, we make do with Catalonian cava and a not-half-bad Côtes du Rhône.

They are probably better for our blood-sugar levels than the erratic fermentations of the past. But for sheer bouquet just now I can’t beat a plod down the garden path and a deep breath under the elder.

Michael Viney's Reflections on Another Life, a selection of columns from the past four decades, is available from irishtimes.com/irishtimesbooks