What shall we drink to?

My previously mentioned plans to set up my own "wine cellar" have finally come together!

The bottles between the two red crates at the bottom are shop bought wine that I've acquired from various sources, one bottle was a present from some guy after I did some work on his house during my handyperson stint and the other two are from when I've done the "M&S dine in for £10" deal which you get a bottle of wine with. I haven't paid for wine in a long time, not since I was trying to impress a girl who asked me round for dinner and asked me to bring a bottle of wine "but not that homemade stuff". What I should have said is "If you want me, and you want me to bring wine, you can have a bottle of the wine I make with love and enthusiasm. Now please give me my heart back." With the exception of those three bottles, all the wine in my cellar in homemade.

The bottom four shelves of wine are for special occasions, as ever since I started making wine I've always tried to keep a bottle from each batch back. I don't want to get *too* precious about it, and I have drunk bottles from this category in the past to celebrate events. The first bottle in my collection is an elderflower made in Summer 2008. Two years of wine making!

After that, I have sorted the everyday wine into the following three categories:

• Wine made from flowers (red clover blossom, rose petal and elderflower)
• Wine made from fruit (date, strawberry jam, tangerine and raisin, peach-pear-and-pineapple, banana, plum mead, pear mead, elderberry)
• Wine made from tea (lapsang souchong, single estate ceylon infused with lemon, earl grey, peppermint)   

I'm enjoying some peach, pear and pinapple wine this evening. When I first tried it in last september as it came out the demi-john I was really disappointed, but it's definitely improved. And keeping it in the cellar means it's still nicely chilled without having to put it in the fridge.

I am completely over-excited at the thought of having people round to dinner and being able to go down into the cellar to choose the right bottle of wine to go with the meal. Hell, I'm even excited about scavenging more planks of wood and bricks to build more shelves to accomodate the wine I'm gonna make this year! I think it would be fair to say that I am very excited about the whole homemade wine situation in general.