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.

Two steep streets, two sets of steps and two staircases up to my bed

Allowing myself one last look over my shoulder, this is the cherry blossom tree in the front garden of my old house. I collected enough blossom to make two gallons of wine, which is fermenting in a bucket in my new house.
It was a long, tiring weekend of moving that started first thing on Saturday and ended about 8pm on Sunday, but I had my sister and two of my best friends helping me move each and every item. I am now safely installed in my new home, on a surprisingly comfy sofa, with my cat purring away next to me. I made it.

To get to our new house, you have to climb up two of the steepest streets I have come across in Leeds (and that's not me exaggerating for dramatic effect), then from our street into our garden there are a couple of steps, and then at the end of the path two more steps up for good measure, before you are finally at the front door. And then my bedroom is in the attic. Both flights of stairs up there are pretty steep too...

I have done this journey with all my possessions by car and van, and after that I have pushed my bike up carrying groceries, and in today's case, a vacuum cleaner strapped to the pannier rack. I just hope my legs get strong soon, I'm still finding it pretty tiring.

I haven't finished unpacking yet, and the kitchen is full of crates of homemade wine stacked up all over the place so I have been eating a lot of pasta, as this requires minimal cooking preparation. I'm hoping to carry all the wine down to the cellar over the weekend and set up some makeshift shelves out of bricks and planks, not least so I can start cooking meals involving vegetables and more that one pan, which is all I have access to at the moment.

But I love the house. I love the wooden floors, and the alcoves for my bookcases, and the fact that I live in the attic bedroom, and the fact that we can have our own wine cellar. I love having a window in the bathroom, and a gas cooker in the kitchen. I love having a mantelpiece to put my toy canal boat on. I love being so close to woodhouse ridge that I can take an alternative route home through the trees without making a detour.

I think I'm going to be very happy here.

Do you want this box? Part Two

On Thursday I received a message from a friend that said:

"Always loads of cardboard boxes in the Merrion Centre loading bay, get in by the hotel. Ask if you need more help."

After this fantastic tip-off, I met the him outside the Merrion Centre when he finished work and collected 7 boxes out of the recycling bins. And there were more, that's just all I could comfortably carry. (And I mean comfortable in the same way that trying to sleep on the megabus is comfortable.) So that's a supply I can tap into on any day it looks like I might not hit my quota.

I've also started thinking about how to transport all my bottles of homemade wine when I move, which led me to a stash of discarded brewery crates.  It took me a long time to work out that brewery crates would be the best way to transport my wine. I'd thought about just putting them in cardboard boxes with bubblewrap (no no no), and then about those cardboard fold-out wine carriers you get from the supermarket, but after having the question in the back of my mind for a couple of days I suddenly remembered these crates I had seen months ago (the sturdy plastic sort that hold 12 bottles) in the backyard of an empty house on my way home from work. I figured they have already been out of circulation so long that the brewery wouldn't miss them, so I might as well use them. I took one today (which I am going to count as today's quota for my "do you want this box?" challenge, even thought it's not made of cardboard), and I plan to pick up another crate each time I'm going past so that I end up with seven or eight of them. Because as well as carrying bottles, they also make great outdoor stools if you upturn them and put a cushion on top. Let's hope we move somewhere with a yard or garden!

I've been making wine for about 18months, and I've probably got about 50 bottles of wine maturing, dating back from when I started. I've also got 9 demi-johns still full of wine, which should be ready to bottle before I move (if not before), so that's another... 54 bottles! Over 100 bottles of wine!!

Wow. I'd never really stopped to think about how much wine I would end up with, I just kept making exciting new varieties, or making more of the delicious ones that got drunk straight away.