So it's a sweet wine?

Which is why you didn't phone me before you decanted?

I could have advised against the squat old fashion glass and the ice cubes...

:-)

Trust me, you wouldn't like it. This stuff is more like a wine cooler than a wine. It goes well over ice. Note too that Vito Corleone drank wine from a similar glass.

Years ago, I helped a beer-brewing friend move an old mattress and box springs from his garage out to the curb for trash pickup. Behind the mattress, there was a six-pack of beer bottles filled with some ginger mead that he had brewed using a beer recipe. He had forgotten about it, and guessed that it was at least two years old.

We opened one bottle right then and there, and that stuff was similar to, but better than Dom Perignon. After that, I wasted a bunch of money buying mead in stores, but it was all crap - like cheap sweet wine. Since that time, I have never found any mead with brewed-in carbonation, much less with microscopic bubbles like that batch of my friend's home-made stuff.

If you want it brewed right, you gotta brew it yourself!

The Shady Grove Meadery near Lake City had a pretty tasty product a few years ago but they folded not long after these photos were made in 2008. You are right though, you can't beat home made.

I also have a recipe for elderblossom wine that came from Germany with my grandmother in 1891. The last time I made it was in 1986 but I have a small bottle that Mama made in the summer of 1971.

It's a pain to make because it requires a quart of the individual elderblossoms, each about 3/16 inch in diameter, in order to make three gallons of wine. The tiny connecting stems make the wine bitter so care must be taken to remove as many as possible. Collecting the necessary flower heads in the wild is a chore too.

My friend gets his home made wines filtered and bottled at Fermentations on Kingston Pike and they sell dried elder flowers. I've often thought of trying a recipe using those.

Dried elder flowers are used in making one of my favorites, Liebfraumilch

A Flickr contact tells me she plans to make a run of this stuff this summer so I modified the webpage to make it a bit easier to follow the recipe. I think I will probably make some more too.

I can just see Toby laughing about this swill right now.

I trust you didn't think from my earlier comment, Kenny, that I have any objection to (dry) "swill?"

That I'm just a tad fussy about its presentation?

We know one another that well, don't we?!

:-)