How to make Pea Pod wine

I’ve been a keen wine maker for several years, making a batch of wine about every other month or so. I love white wine mainly, but I also like red wine too. I don’t drink as much red to white as it can give me a terrible headache, or is it a hangover, not sure which lol.

On to making some wine then, its midwinter here in the UK so you won’t find any soft fruit to pick and make wine out of. You could buy some fruit from t eh local supermarket, I did notice the other week that Tesco was still selling Blackberries.

Most of the wines are very similar to make, it just the changes in the main in ingredient like grapes to oranges to blackberries. Then there’s the different amount of sugar to use and if you need to use a lemon or 2.

Wine making is very simple to do I guess people are put off from making their own wine because the time it takes to mature. But once you got over that and you make wine regular, you soon have wine all the year round.

For this Hub my first in wine making I’ll start with pea pod wine, if you’ve ever seen the Good life, a 70’s sitcom you know it’s a good wine.

·         Fermentation jar and air lock

·         5 gallon brewing bucket with a tight lid

·         A good general purpose cleaner and steriliser

·         Demi-john with air lock

A good local wine making shop will sell all you need to make wine, if there not one near you try the internet or Amazon, they sell most all most everything. Clean and sterilise the 5-gallon brewing bucket, now you are ready to start you wine.

You will need

·         5lb’s of peas and pods

·         Juice 1 lemon

·         Juice 1 orange

·         ½ oz of wine yeast

·         3 lb of sugar

·         8 pints of boiling water

·          Wash and slice the pea pods

·          Put them into a 5 gallon brewing bucket pour 8 pints of boiling water over them

·         Leave for 4 days to infuse

Clean and sterilise the demi-john

·         Measure the liquid and add sugar, lemon and orange juice and yeast to the demi-john, place air lock and leave in a warm place (65 to 75 Fahrenheit to ferment.

·         When the bubbling as stopped, the wine should then be stirred.

·         Leave for 3 or 4 days to settle

·         Strain the liquid into a clean and sterilise demi-john using a thick muslin cloth or something similar, making sure you fill it to the brim, cork and leave for 6 months

·         Pour into bottles, cork and leave in a cool dark place. Leave to stand for at least a few more months before you drink it.

It should be ready to drink. Hope you enjoy. It will take about a year with most wines from start to finish. There are several ways in which you can speed this up, however I’m old fashioned and do it the old way that my father showed me many years ago. It worked for me over the years, wine is thing that shouldn’t be rushed.

I hope that you will enjoy your pea pod wine, it’s really nice a strong white wine. Just don’t be put off with the length of time it takes to make. It’s rather rewarding to taste the wine that you have made.

Take care and all the best with the wine making