Folly and a question about corks.

[Karen_D]

There is a type of wine called Folly which is made from vine prunings but can also be made from soft, summer bramble prunings. Has anyone ever made this or tasted some? How was it? The book I have describes it as a dry white.

Secondly, when my father made wine he never used corks but recycled whisky bottles including the screw caps. I don't recall having bad wine. We never laid it down for any great length of time and it always seemed fine. Does anyone else use this method?

Wassail

Karen

[Dendrobium]

I did use old spirit bottles years ago when I was bottling and brewing everything i could find. They seemed ok with screw caps, but I still prefered puting cork or plastic stoppers as overtime the caps did go manky. They also tend to be more robust and thicker than wine bottles, but never used them if it was something likely to be gassey.

Having said all that, my worst encounter was with normal cork stoppers. I used an old one in a demijohn of wine that was starting to look fantastic, I didn't have enough bottles to decant it at the time. A few months later the cork had tainted the wine and ended up throwing it all away These days I'll only use rubber stoppers for gallon jars because of that.

[red]

I think screw top bottles are fine for wine, and in fact as cork is becoming less available, the large winemakers have turned to screw top - it used to be a sign of cheap wine, but no more - the screw top gets respect!

[Cheezy]

My Gran (whom I owe all my home brew interest) probably never bought a bottle of wine in her life.

She did however sink many a whiskey and gin! And so her bottling source was screw tops, and I'm going back to the 40 and 50's right upto a few years ago.

Her wine was legendry, I still can't achieve the results she did. And she could make wine out of anything. And frequently did!.

She lived upto last year to a ripe age of 96, and she would have made 100 (she wanted the telegram) had she not had a minor fall and gone in to hospital for a few days observation. She died of C. Deficil, the new endemic in all the hospitals.

At 90 she went to the doctor's with my aunt, he asked her if she was still smoking, and she sheepishly said occasionally (20 a day) and did she still enjoy a drink, again some times. He heard the snigger from my aunt. So he recommended trying to cut down a bit.

She followed his advice and instead of buying 9 bottles of cheap an' nasty whiskey a week she dropped to 3 bottle of Bell's! God Bless Her.

[the.fee.fairy]

i use screw top bottles (some are vodka bottles, some whisky, i've got a jack-daniels bottle ready for the mead). But then i'm cheap and i beg bottle from everyone..