Fruit wine is one of Britain's great quiet traditions: wine made not from grapes but from whatever the season is giving away, blackberries from the lane, elderberries from the hedge, rhubarb from the corner of the garden nobody remembers planting. For centuries it was simply called country wine, and it turns out you need neither a vineyard nor a view of Tuscany to make it. A hedgerow wine kit supplies the specialist ingredients and the method; you supply the fruit, the sugar and a few litres of patience. This guide covers what hedgerow wine is, what you can make, how the four stages work, and the questions every first-time winemaker asks us.
What is hedgerow wine, and why is it called country wine?
Hedgerow wine is wine made from fruit, flowers and even vegetables rather than grapes. The grand European tradition says wine begins in a vineyard; the British tradition, being both practical and slightly contrary, says it begins wherever fruit is free. Blackberry, elderberry, damson, sloe, gooseberry: these are the country wines, made in kitchens and sheds for generations by people who looked at a glut of fruit and refused to waste it.
Our recipe book opens with Martin Luther's line that "beer is made by men, wine by God", which feels about right, because the winemaker's job is mostly to give the yeast good conditions and then stay out of the way. We've been putting together our homemade wine kit here in the UK since 2011 and have sold tens of thousands, and the appeal hasn't changed: a drink with a story, made from fruit with a postcode.
What can you make with a hedgerow wine kit?
Rather more than you'd guess. The recipe table in our Hedgerow Wine Making Kit runs to over thirty wines, with exact fruit and sugar quantities for each. The hedgerow classics are all there: blackberry, elderberry, sloe, damson, crab apple, rosehip and rowanberry. So are the garden and greengrocer wines: plum, rhubarb, gooseberry, strawberry, pear and cherry. Then it gets properly adventurous, with rose petal wine made from just 50g of petals, parsnip wine (peeled, chopped small and ready to surprise people), and even a honey mead option for anyone who fancies brewing like a medieval monk.
In other words, one box is a blackberry wine kit, an elderberry wine kit and a rhubarb wine kit all at once. Each batch makes one gallon, about 4.5 litres, which works out at six standard bottles.
Do you have to forage the fruit yourself?
Not at all, but it's half the romance. Buying fruit works perfectly, and frozen fruit is often cheaper still. That said, we'd genuinely encourage you to explore your local hedgerows and make your wine with seasonal, local ingredients, because a bottle of blackberry wine tastes better when you remember the afternoon you picked it. Take a foraging guide with you (the book kind or the human kind) so you know exactly what you're picking.
Foraging also sets the calendar for your country wine making: something is always coming into season, from elderflowers (30g dried, or about a pint of fresh heads) to sloes and rosehips, which is a very good excuse for there always being something in the demijohn.
What's inside the wine making kit, and what do you add?
The kit's job is to supply the specialist things you can't pick up in a normal supermarket:
- Wine yeast, the engine of the whole affair, which turns sugar into alcohol.
- Pectolase, a sachet that goes in with the warm fruit at the very start.
- Finings, a very fine natural clay that clears the finished wine. Nothing animal-derived, so your wine stays vegetarian and vegan friendly.
- A stabiliser tablet, which calls time on the yeast before clearing and bottling.
- Steriliser, for making your bottles scrupulously clean.
- Citric acid, for sharpening the finished wine to taste.
- A straining bag, for separating the spent fruit from the young wine.
You add the fruit and ordinary granulated sugar in the quantities the recipe table gives, plus some basic equipment: a 5 litre food-grade bucket with a lid for the first fermentation, a 5 litre demijohn with an airlock (or a second bucket) for the second, kitchen scales, a siphon tube and six bottles (reused screw-top wine bottles are perfect).
How does making wine at home actually work?
Four stages, and none of them is difficult.
Stage one is the first fermentation, and it happens on the fruit. You wash, stone and crush your fruit into the bucket, dissolve part of the sugar in hot water, add the pectolase as it cools, then add the yeast once the liquid has dropped below 30°C. The lid goes on loosely, and this matters: fermentation produces carbon dioxide, and a tightly sealed container can end its days dramatically. Three days of bubbling later, the fruit has given up its flavour and colour.
Stage two is the second fermentation. You pour everything through the straining bag into a clean container, discard the fruit, stir in the rest of the sugar dissolved in hot water, and top up to 4.5 litres. Now the airlock goes on, a small water-filled valve that lets gas escape while keeping outside air away from your wine. This is the long stage: around three weeks somewhere steadily warm, between 22°C and 27°C, while bubbles rise through the airlock. Watching them is the most satisfying part of the whole process.
Stage three is clearing and stabilising. When the bubbles stop, you crush in the stabiliser tablet, wait two days while the dissolved gas escapes, then whisk the finings into a little boiling water and stir them in. Within a fortnight or so the wine drops clear, and you siphon it off the sediment and sharpen it with citric acid, half a teaspoon at a time, tasting as you go.
Stage four is bottling. Sterilise your bottles with the steriliser sachet, siphon in the clear wine, leave a little airspace at the top and tighten the caps. Then comes the only genuinely hard part of home winemaking, which is leaving it alone.
How long does country wine take, and how strong is it?
Honestly: your wine will be drinkable from 8 to 12 weeks after you start, and most of that time is simply waiting while the yeast, and then the sediment, get on with their work. You can sneak an early bottle, but country wines genuinely improve with patience: leaving it longer rewards you with a smoother, rounder wine. Once bottled, drink it within a year.
As for strength, most batches land around 11 to 13% alcohol, and in perfect conditions the yeast can take it all the way to 16%. And if six bottles sounds like it might not last, the recipes scale up directly, though we'd suggest making one small batch of a new recipe first to check you love it.
What goes wrong, and how do you fix it?
Three problems account for nearly every worried message we receive, and all three are fixable.
Fermentation will not start. Yeast needs warmth, so first move the bucket somewhere warmer, away from cold draughts, and give it a day or two. If nothing happens, make a yeast starter: empty the yeast into 50ml of warm water and leave for five minutes, dissolve a teaspoon of sugar in 75ml of warm water and add it, then cover and leave somewhere warm and dark for three to four hours. When it turns cloudy with foam on top, the yeast is awake and ready to pitch in.
It's still bubbling at three weeks. Perfect, let it finish, however long it takes; timings vary with temperature, acidity and sugar. What you must never do is bottle early, because wine still fermenting in a sealed bottle means over-sweet wine at best and burst bottles at worst. It's done when the airlock has gone quiet and stays quiet.
The finished wine is too sweet. Usually the fermentation stopped early because the wine was kept somewhere too cool, so move it somewhere warmer and give it more time. Less often, so much sugar went in that the yeast reached its alcohol ceiling (around 13 to 14%) before the sugar ran out, which a hydrometer reading would confirm.
Every batch of the Hedgerow Wine Making Kit comes with the full recipe book, and we're just a message away if yours does something the book didn't predict.
Fruit wine FAQs
Can I use frozen fruit?
Yes, and it's often cheaper. Defrost it thoroughly and let it come up to room temperature first, otherwise the liquid will be too cold for the yeast to get going.
Can I use canned fruit?
We wouldn't. The flavour disappoints, the syrup makes sugar levels hard to judge, and many brands contain preservatives that stop the yeast fermenting at all.
What sugar should I use?
Ordinary white granulated sugar, no specialist brewing sugar required. Artificial sweeteners won't work at all, because the yeast has to eat real sugar to make the alcohol.
Can I use honey instead of sugar?
You can, and the result is closer to a melomel, which is a fruit mead. Use 1.2 to 1.3kg of honey for every 1kg of sugar in the recipe.
Can I mix two fruits together?
Yes. Take the two recipes and scale each in proportion: for a 50:50 blend, use half of each recipe's fruit and sugar.
Where do I go if I get stuck mid-batch?
Head for the Help Hut wine guide, which covers everything from cloudy wine to back sweetening a batch that finished too dry.
Pick a fruit, pick a weekend, and let the Hedgerow Wine Making Kit turn the two of them into six bottles of your own country wine.
