Drink - Victoria Moore perseveres with some traditional wines for cool climates
"Is it just me, or is all that gear strictly necessary?" asks my latest love, nodding across at the herd of elderly ramblers blocking the path ahead. Copious layers of waterproofs, cabled jumpers, hiking socks and proper boots make them appear perfectly rotund. We saunter past, our Gucci loafers (him) and heeled boots (me) making easy work of the gravel path.
"Just think of all those horrible sandwiches in all those rucksacks," my latest love continues, 30 suspended packs of cling-filmed, sweating Sunblest, margarine and meat paste moving across his mind's eye.
We reach a gate and a dividing of ways. The river runs shallow and brown around the stepping stones and the sky through the arch of the Bolton Abbey ruins is periwinkle blue, but we are lazy good-for-nothings at heart and, even though our stomachs are replete with a breakfast of kippers, we still divert quickly to the post office and shop in the car park. There we find bottles of fruit wine made by Orchard Fruit Wine in nearby Wetherby, their labels bearing the Bolton Abbey frank. I venture to suggest the wine might not actually be that nice, considering it's targeted as a special gift for the sturdy rambling types we have just disdained. But we buy some anyway. Three bottles in fact: pear, elderberry and blackberry and apple.
Practically any fruit or plant can be made into something bearing a resemblance to wine - it just needs to contain sugar to enable it to ferment. My father used to trawl the hedgerows for elderberries, rosehips and even dandelions that he'd mash up in a huge bucket. Afterwards, demijohns filled with murky liquid would stand for weeks on top of the boiler in the kitchen before the wine was eventually deemed ready for bottling. The filled bottles would be squirrelled away into the home-sawn wine rack that just fitted between the Morris Marina and my pogo stick in the garage. But I was too young and never discovered what their contents tasted like.
But do you have to go on a long, cold walk wearing galoshes and balaclavas to enjoy fruit wines? Such things must often be drunk in context. Fruit wines are in fact very common in cool climates, and particularly in Scandinavia and the northern United States. My cousin, a bottling and pickling girl in the making if ever I saw one, is more enthusiastic. "I'm sure they would be delicious with an autumn fruit crumble," she trills, in well-bred, good housekeeping style. Then she opens one straight away to drink with dinner. Fair enough, I suppose. Fruit wines are best drunk soon after being bottled because the discernible characteristic fruit flavours quickly fade. There's no point risking them spoiling.
My cousin's argument is that blackberry and apple wine will be a great match for the duck spring rolls and plum sauce we're about to eat. We really want to like it. But we don't. Not much, anyway. It just tastes like a cheap, ropey wine - lacking in depth, velvet and richness. We persevere for a while before admitting that, though we don't dislike it, we're not enjoying it either. There's a disappointing lack of brambliness. I'd been expecting something so rich you might almost want to douse it in thick, yellow custard, but it's not to be.
In all fairness, we think we ought to give the pear one a go. This has been chilling in the fridge, so has a good edge to it. At 14 per cent it's also quite strong, and reminds us both of sherry. "Or mead," says my cousin, though heaven knows when she might have tasted mead. Perhaps she is right. There is a delicious honey taste and we can detect pears, too. In fact, this makes an excellent aperitif, though I like to think it's not a patch on the wines my father made.
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