Vin de noix

Even though you won’t be able to make this fortified wine until next June or July I’m posting the recipe now as vin de noix has a Christmasy feel. It’s definitely a winter tipple and decanted into pretty bottles would make a great Christmas present.

Traditional vin de noix (walnut wine) is made from young walnuts, red wine, distilled alcohol and sugar. These are walnuts that can easily be quartered and are just starting to form their shells. This is the reason why I made this wine initially. I’d left it too late to make pickled walnuts but had a bag of young walnuts knocking about in the kitchen
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In France vin de noix is a celebrated countryside drink that is also used in cooking. There are loads of recipes on the Internet. The one that I chose was from William Rubel. I made my vin de noix in early August 2008.

Reading around the subject I’d noted that vin de noix is said to improve with age. As so often happens, in my haste to get the demijohn into the barn I did not note that the length of time for steeping the walnuts is generally around two months. I assumed that the longer the walnuts stayed in the mix the better the drink would be!

When I stepped into the barn, torch in hand, I had no idea that I had made this mistake. I was thinking about a little mid morning cheer. Eventually I unearthed the demijohn, dusted it off and removed the air lock. It smelt good and deeply alcoholic.  Standing under the looping cobwebs and probably watched by a thousand spider eyes, I took a tentative sip. It was delicious – almost like port.

A small glass was rushed up to the Rat Room for Danny.“Mmm It tastes great! Perfect for Christmas.”It would be glorious poured over ice cream and I have a feeling that it would be good if it was heated too.

I only discovered my steeping gaff when I was nosing about the Internet this week. Next year I will definitely be making this again. Steeping for just the customary two months. It will be interesting to compare the difference in flavour, if we have any left.

Walnut wine. Vin de noix recipe

Ingredients:
One three litre box of red wine
600ml of vodka
600g of granulated sugar
30 walnuts (as some of them were very small)

Method:
Quarter the walnuts lengthwise (wear gloves as the walnuts will stain your hands and also avoid using a wooden board)
Place the walnuts in a gallon demijohn (or split them equally between large Le Parfait jars)
Add the sugar, vodka and red wine (I used a winemaking airlock to seal the demijohn)
Steep the wine for two months and then strain through muslin and bottle. Store in a dark place.

This recipe makes four litres of vin de noix .

Finally, I decided to try my hand at walnut wine. This is a speciality in France and there are endless recipes available.  The recipe that I used is here.  This recipe for vin de noix is on a fascinating site written by William Rubel. The author distils his own spirits amongst other things. An interesting site and well worth a visit.

I used a three litre box of wine, 600ml of vodka, 600g of granulated sugar and about 30 walnuts (as some of them were very small).

It will be a long time before tiny hands clap with glee at the uncorking of a bottle of walnut wine, as it is best left for several years. But time seems to rush by at a horrifying speed in the cottage so it’s worth the investment. Apparently is tastes a bit like port and the longer it matures the better it tastes.

I moved a demi john of mead this afternoon. Started in 2005. Danny was goggle eyed when I suggested that we gave it a go.
“Will we be alive then?”
Only two more years to go before a wrinkly mead lift off.

I started winemaking with enormous enthusiasm and hope. I like wine. Always fancy a glass or two with supper. If we could make our own gluggable wine it would be brilliant. So I invested in the wine making kit that had belonged to a German P.O.W. who’d married an English girl and stayed in the UK after WW2. It was the dream Ebay purchase. The kit consists of everything that an optimistic would be wine maker could possibly need, with the exception of the chemicals and the fruit. There are still a few bits and pieces that I am not sure what jobs they might fulfil.

Included in the equipment were two good winemaking books First Steps in Winemaking by C J J Berry and Complete Home Winemaking by Gillian Pearks. Both are reviewed here . The latter is only occasionally available on the internet, although I’ve just spotted a few copies on Amazon. If you are interested in making country wine buy a copy immediately – it is my winemaking bible. Gillian Pearks won awards for her wine. She is well worth checking out and this is the book that I always turn to first. Since then I found a copy of Daphne Moore’s slim volume at the church fete. Highly recommended too (and incidentally on offer at only ?1.50 – second hand – on Amazon at the moment). It’s a booklet but has given me lots of tips and inspiration.

So I made wine. Loads of it. Plum, wild plum, greengage, blackberry, rhubarb, rosehip, pea pod, mixed autumn berries, damson, dandelion. I even tried making wine with the grapes from our vine.

The demijohns bubbled away and after a year we tasted each one.

The results were so disappointing that I just made a couple of batches a year to keep my hand in. What a mistake!

This week we have discovered that country wine takes far longer to mature than the books suggest. You are looking at two or three years of maturing before you wave goodbye to Oddbins.

Monday’s sips were a revelation. So over the last couple of days we’ve been tasting a few more demijohns. This has to be done in stages, as even if the wine isn’t ready it’s still very strong. Wine tasting ideally needs to be tackled after dusk when Jalopy has settled for the night, wheels dug firmly into the gravel drive.

Although I was working just across the road today, I wondered if wafts of homemade wine were drifting across the room when I chatted to my client this afternoon. I had literally sampled just 4 thimblefuls and felt a lot chirpier than an hour before when I ran across the road for lunch. Yet again rain had stopped play.

A 2007 rosehip wine smelt like heaven but descaled our teeth. The 2005 greengage wine was exceptionally good but the 2006 and 2007 reminiscent of cheap Muscadet. A 2006 plum wine surprised us, it would be light and gluggable on a warm summer’s evening. Then we turned to the 2005 pea pod wine. Danny was gallant and took the first quaff.
“It tastes of peas, but sweet and all a homemade wine should be.”

The 2005 blackberry wine was very good. We have tasted the demijohn each year and it has been vile but left to mature it’s now better than our regular table wine. Not too sweet or too sharp. Joanne Harris’ novel Blackberry Wine inspired the idea of home made wine for me. So it’s just as it should be.

Thank goodness I have let the blackberries ramble this year.