Poussey's Prison Hooch

In no way am I condoning trying this!

With no equipment to measure the chemical components, or even ABV%... This stuff can be (and sadly often is) lethal.

But I've been asked about it often enough so I'll concede...

It's a concept as old as incarceration itself - as long as people have been locked up, they've wanted a way to get liquored up. Pruno, Pochi, Prison juice, Prison Claret, Raisin Jacks, Doin' time Moonshine... However you wish to put it. People have managed to get smashed in Jail, all you need is a few ingredients and the knowledge to put it together to evolve into something ungodly.

                                                                  

Tastes like freedom...

The basics of booze creation are fairly simple...

Yeast + Sugar = Alcohol and Co2

This is normally done with harvested grains, grapes, fruits, carefully selected yeasts and sugars, hops flavourings, fancy filtration methods, chemical stabilisation and constant evaluation as to how the finished product is coming along... But in this instance, imagine you're in lock-up for the next 20 or so years for whatever the hell you did, With a bin bag, ketchup, and a dream.

The basics:
A bin bag (or an equivalent airtight bag)
Somewhere dark, warm, and safe from guards.

The Ingredients:
Fruit, most recipes start with oranges, peeled. About 8 mid size.
Can of fruit cocktail (or any tinned fruit, the sugar and syrup is what you're after)
200g Sugar
A cup of Ketchup
Water
You may add a slice of bread, some believe the yeast contained is required and some say it makes it taste even worse. Up to you!

The Method
Combine your choice of fruit with the fruit cocktail, by "combine" I mean put it in the bin bag and smash it up. Add a mug of water. You may wish to use a sock to filter the pulp and keep the liquid clear, you classy thing you.

Make it warm, keep it by the radiator, run the bag under hot water, draw a face on it and cuddle it... whatever, you need to keep it warm and safe until the bag swells. Think of it as your own "Wilson"

Leave Wilson for 48 hours.

At this point, you want to open the bag, ideally with a towel over your face, it will stink. Add your sugar and ketchup (and bread if you like the toasted brioche notes) Stick it next to a radiator. Say goodbye once again to Wilson. Do with your time what you will.

Over the next couple days, keep an eye out. If the bag looks like it wants to explode, let out a little bit of the gas.

In about a week, you will have a ballooning bag of hell-gas. You will want to strain out the liquid, mould, and bread using a towel or sock, whatever you have available.

If you happen to have it available, add a crumbled up Vitamin C tablet
This isn't too alien a concept for prisons as they've been known in the US to seriously limit the amount of fresh fruit available purely to curb Pruno production, so prisoners were supplemented with Vit C to keep away scurvy. Vitamin C should stop the fermentation process so you can bottle your creation.

And Godspeed to you. The hangover is supposed to be hell on earth

Fundamentally people are creative things, most are born survivors and when imprisoned will find ways to make life bearable. The recipes available are almost exclusively from one country. You'd think this would have to be the kind of nation to imprison a huge proportion of its population to get so many variances and names for one thing. Maybe its some kind of impoverished hell hole bent on making sure it has more prisoners than any other nation on earth. Maybe its the world of RoboCop?

                                             

Wines can be made from some seriously disgusting things...

So most people know of a few different grape varieties, even if its just down to Merlot, Chardonnay or a Shiraz. But what a lot of folks don't know is that wines have been made from hundreds of different things across different cultures for thousands of years. My Pal Rich was lucky enough to try some Sparrow Wine whilst out in China.

Richard couldn't organise a piss up in a OH GOD NO

1.) Well... Poop

The Koreans... they have mixed it (animal AND human) with Soju - a type of grain base spirit. So not technically a wine by western terms but still referred to as a wine. Apparently the *ahem* base ingredient is fermented for several months with different herb mixes and it results in a sweet red tinged liquid. 

2.) Meteorites! 

This one is fairly awesome. A Chilean producer has made "Meteorito" a Cabernet Sauvignon which is fermented with a meteorite submerged in it. Supposedly crashing into northern Chile 6000 years ago it gives the wine a unique  "lively" taste

3.) Cannabis Sauvignon

Yeah... this was the brainchild of the Californians. Apparently stooping cannabis leaves with Cabernet Sauvignon is the way to go, though they are experimenting with several other blends.

But so far the product creates "an interesting little buzz" and works faster than pot brownies. Rock goddess Melissa Etheridge is one of the best producers apparently!

4.) Tiger Bone Wine

This one is really upsetting, traditionally thought to have potent medicinal qualities, the bones of these incredible endangered animals are soaked in spirit for months at a time. The price can go up to a grand a bottle depending on how long the mixture has been brewed for. In China it was thought the wine can bring goodies such as long life and sexual prowess. 

5.) Deer Penis

Though nowhere near endangered, the practice of creating this wine where the Penis is fermented in grain spirit traditionally requires the deer to still be alive when it is removed. In Chinese tradition this blend is supposed to support bones and sexual prowess. It is also recommended to pregnant women to increase the strength of themselves and their unborn babies. Apparently before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, athletes were discouraged from drinking it as it can contain performance enhancing substances when finished. So maybe there is something to it after all!

Of late...Deer have been evolving fangs, we don't know why...

Well I hope that wet your appetite! Maybe the fish guts, egg, and blood used in the wine you could well be drinking this weekend will seem mundane by now! Or maybe you didn't know about that...

There are many more weird/gross ingredients used to make booze - I'll come back with more at a later date. For now enjoy the lovely start of 2015, go for a walk and soak up the countryside. Just stay the hell away from the damn deer.

Back in my Hexham Home ;)

Hi Folks

I've relocated back to the North and I'm based once again in Hexham.

I'll be updating this site and hopefully adding a little Kickstarter campaign to get a few things up and running in the future ;)

Think home Wine Tastings, fun nights in and learning something new for the people of Hexham and Northumberland

Until then... I'm sorting out a business plan

Over and out

Em

The Demon Hangover

To answer the question from Lydia O

"Loving the blog! Learnt a lot and want to keep learning please... friends say to me that their hangover is worse because they mixed their wines, as opposed to sticking to the same wine all night...is there any truth to this? Thank you Wine Wizard, xx"

I'm fairly sure, everyone reading this blog will at some point, woken up to a wave of nausea, dizziness, trembling and the sensation the devil is pounding a pneumatic drill from behind your eyeballs.

So let me explain...

Happy hangover spring chicken! The memories start flooding back... well some of them.
You see, when you drink - or more rather get drunk, your brain has to deal with simple tasks that you've just made a million times harder than normal; talking, standing up, walking and not falling over and insulting the host take priority over the less important task of remembering what happened for later.

Extreme thirst! If I overdo it... rarely of course :/ I can have dreams of drinking from fresh mountain springs or that someone is making me iced tea in the kitchen, whereas actually I'm flat out and very hung-over, it’s no secret alcohol makes you dehydrated, but dehydration seems to be something people underestimate. That feeling that your brain has anchored up and is swishing around your head is understandable - when you dehydrate yourself the soaking wet sponge that is your poor brain actually does shrink, pulling on the membranes connecting it to your skull leaving you with a horrendous headache.


When you put alcohol in your body, it turns off the part of your brain that tells your kidneys to soak up water, so you pee more without actually getting water from it. In fact if you drink a glass of 250ml wine, you can expect to pee up to 4x that amount! Hence the really long queue for the bathroom in pubs and clubs.

The people getting worse hangovers because of "mixing their wines" can blame some evil little things called congeners. These are little toxins that live in every alcoholic drink as a by-product of its production. In darker drinks such as red wine, bourbon, brandies and dark tequila there are higher levels and lots of different forms of these congeners... so be it wine, beer, spirits or bubbly, mixing is bad.

This image mirrors the effect of what alcohol can do to the control of your body down to the alignment of your eyes. Horrible innit? Yes, she is judging you.


Imagine your poor liver on a treadmill, he's happily doing a stead 6mph jog dealing with alcohol and a few congeners when you have that small white wine... then you decide to move to red wine after another glass of white, then you decide to have a beer, then another wine and then you reach the point when the absolute BEST idea in the world is to order a round of shots. You've just made your liver go from 6mph to 20mph to 100mph without giving him a break! That’s pretty mean.

But he's going to make you pay for it. Combining all these various levels of alcohol and various impurities you've given your body left it with a big backlog of horrible things to eradicate in a very short period of time. I shouldn’t have to explain how your stomach deals with this backlog to those of you who have ridden the vomit comet after a night on the sauce.

We have a lovely substance our body uses as a natural stimulant, it helps us feel perky and helps lower us into a deep lovely sleep when we haven’t hammered it with booze. It’s called Glutamine, and it is inhibited by alcohol, meaning we don’t get a good enough night’s sleep and our body tries to overcome it by giving us a glutamine rebound - we need it, but while its happening its responsible for tremors, anxiety, restlessness and high blood pressure.

Apart from a few odd theories scientists have come up with, such as sleeping it off in an oxygen tent, there’s a few steps apart from not drinking on an empty stomach, drinking a LOT of water, before, during and after drinking alcohol to help prevent the demon hangover.

Pop a couple aspirin with a big glass of water before bed, and one as you wake up - this can calm down the effects quite a lot.

Try to limit smoking while you drink, you add to the mountain of toxins your body has to shift, so if you are a slave to the nicotine, try and hold back a little.

If you feel too bad to eat in the morning, sleep. Sleep is the best medicine for your body, so do it.

But if it’s the morning after, and you can face it, do this;

Eggs for breakfast! cysteine is a compound found in eggs that helps your body sweep up the toxins left over by booze (sheep also need cysteine to make wool - my random fact of the day!)

A glass, or preferably a few of orange juice, drinking uses up a lot of your bodies vitamin C needed to help detoxify you.

Grab a sports drink, or make up a dioralyte drink, this will help replace your lost sugars, salts and electrolytes.

And remember, alcohol messes up your brains ability to rationalize, balance, make clear decisions, keep your balance, or look half decent. So when you think your hair is immaculate, your lipstick is perfectly aligned and you are walking seductively toward your date, you actually look like Aileen Wuornos.

If you are currently suffering take my advice and follow my steps, but in the meantime this adorable kitten video should make you feel better. Now go back to sleep.

Stuck With Wine Stained Teeth? Heres a few tips...

When I was at Plumpton College we would often have to sample wine after wine for usually 90 mins or so - once these flights were finished you'd turn to your neighbour and "OH MY GOD! do my teeth look like that?"

Which leads me to attempting to answer my first question from Mike B who says...

"Right..... I need you to write a post on your blog that explains in detail how to drink red wine without ending up looking like a vampire bat that has just finished a meal whilst hanging upside down!!
I find that drinking from the bottle instead of using a glass helps but I think that is probably frowned upon as poor etiquette... X"

We've all been there, you're washing your hands in the restaurant bathroom having a lovely elegant evening and the vampire bat glares back at you from the mirror, so theres a couple of things you can do

*Grab some tissue and rub your teeth frantically - this old chestnut works, but you can end up coughing up tissue at the table. Elegant.

*Move onto white wine, it gets red wine out of the carpet and the same goes for your teeth!

*Brush ups, little minty tooth wipes you slip on your finger, you get them on long haul flights and motorway services

*Cheese! its got the perfect texture and it can help slowly get the tannin off your teeth, also wine + cheese = awesome

*DONT brush your teeth straight after drinking - the acid in the wine makes the enamel on your teeth porous so brushing can damage this much further

*Drink red before white, if you begin with white the acid erodes the enamel again - so the pigment in red wine has something to hold onto and make you lovely and monster mouthed

In order to prevent it happening in the first place...

*Vaseline, it works but you have the downside of actually having vaseline on your teeth - I cant imagine who actually does this but each to their own...

*Drink through a straw - it wont go down well with most wine lovers but models and actors have a habit of drinking coke, coffee, red wine etc through straws because when you suck the liquid up it goes to the back of your mouth instead of running over your teeth. It works but still... its a straw. And you probably aren't famous, and no, you cant get away with it.

*Move to a lighter less tannic red, Beaujolais or Pinot Noir is better for not staining your teeth than a really heavy Malbec or Cabernet.

But in all honesty, if you like red wine, deal with the stains. Oh and make sure you brush your teeth well twice a day like your mother told you to.

Theres always the expensive option of professional whitening if it gets too bad!

Who is the Wine Wizard?

Evening all,

Having read through my previous posts I realised I havent made any particular reference to my experience! I've decided to add the tag "ask me anything" but why should you?

Since I'm a young'un you might decide I'm not qualified enough... But! maybe not, each generation starts off young after all...

Well I grew up in the beautiful Northumberland originally from Newcastle upon Tyne, schooling wise I went to a catholic middle and local high school - I was good at English, History, Music, R.E... anything other than Math really (hated it!)

I juggled a few courses at college in Newcastle after I graduated and didnt find anything I cared about enough to stick with it, so I took a part time job at a local Wine Rack (RIP)

I started to discover this bizarre world of odd wine labels and a thousand or so bottles of this nice smelling stuff I knew nothing about. So with the help of a few dusty old encyclopedias of wine in the back office I began to study. I loved that job and worked full time after being promoted, took a few exams and started my qualifications with WSET (Wine and Spirit Educational Trust) eventually it became clear my beloved Wine Rack parent company was going under and...

Sommelier training! At a Fine Dining Restaurant in Northumberland, a swanky golf resort who got me a lot of experience with wine folk. I took the position because I wanted more knowledge which I realised I wasnt really getting after a few months so it didnt take me too long to give in and google wine courses in the uk and.... http://www.plumpton.ac.uk/ popped up. So in the space of a few weeks i packed up, moved 320 miles to the south coast and studied Wine Business FdA for 2 years with some fantastic people, amazing lecturers and all the experiences you could possibly want studying the wonderful world of wine.

I spent two years working for a local brewery in Sussex as the Assistant Wine Development Manager, still holding tastings, studying and ultimately drinking wine!

I moved onto doing private tastings for people, each one less than 2 hours long, maybe a dozen or so wines, I made it fun but educational (I'd like to think!) and it got me thinking about what I might like to do for myself in the future.

Now that I'm back in Hexham with old friends and family, I'd like to hopefully begin this adventure for myself and keep you all posted. I will be drawing up a Business Plan and keeping people updated on how I'm doing...

I hope this odd entry gives you a little insight to who I am and maybe you guys would be willing to shoot me some questions? Come on - I might get writers block!

Etiquette Schmetiquette

Picture the scene... A table covered in cheeses, trifles, steaks salads and sorbets, no knives or forks, a bottle of Chablis stinking of wet dog by the doorway and a ziplock bag floating atop a pool of decanted Château La Fleur-Pétrus 1961 next to a stopwatch, a long faced guest looking down on his Winemakers Selection Riesling and a bottle of red in the microwave.

This sounds like a fairly messy dinner party I’m sure you’ll agree. But I’m going to explain a few things about this scene which might possibly help you out the next time you have some buddies knocking at the door... No really I promise.

First off why the ridiculously laid out table?

This is a deviation from the style of dining you’ll be familiar with, going to a classy dinner party you’d normally expect courses one after the other, bread followed by starter followed by mains followed by sweet followed by cheeses or something of the sort. This style is known as “Service á la Russe” or “like the Russians” Traditionally in France and the Mediterranean meals would be laid out all at once encouraging swapping, talking, moving, sharing and more talking. If you’ve been lucky enough to go to a traditional family meal around the med you’ll know you may well start eating as late as 10pm. When travelling with my family we once had this experience and I actually had to dive myself into their swimming pool circa 3 am to stop myself falling asleep at the table!

I want to highlight the talking – you ever noticed you tend to have a better laugh when you order food and share it around the table? This is my idea of food heaven. So no silent delicate polite eating at my house ok? Cutlery is in the middle, get it yourself.

Why is the stinky wine still out?

So you’ve opened a nice bottle only to find it stinks like a dog, well if you leave that bottle open for a day or so you might well find that fault or cork taint has “blown off” (here comes the science...) TCA is the compound responsible for this, it exists in a small percentage of corks (3-5%) before they are used in bottling– we can detect it at levels as low as one part per trillion. All science considered – I’ve known wines I opened thinking to be useless sort itself out over night, it’s worth a try before you glug it down the drain!

And the floating ziplock?

Freezer bags, for some bizarre reason are able to absorb traces of TCA  - so you may not expect to see a ziplock bag floating around the decanter in a fine dining restaurant but I don’t run a fine dining restaurant do I? Squidge it out of the way with your spoon my friend It’s soaking up stinky trace elements you don’t want to notice.

 Stopwatch?

If I ever had a hope in hells chance to indulge anybody other than myself in a bottle of Château La Fleur-Pétrus’ in my lifetime I might well set a time limit on you all to finish the bottle. Very old wines can oxidise in as little as 10 minutes and I’m not spending that kind of money on you to let it go to waste!

Why the Miserable guest?

Not that I’d ever mention it to a guest obviously the more wine I’m given at a party the nicer I will be (friends take note). Terms written on a wine label such as “Old Vine” “Winemakers Selection” “Vineyard Collection” etc mean absolutely nothing. It’s a term the lovely people at the vineyard or in the world of marketing gave that product to make it sound more appealing or better than their lowest level wine.

Red Wine in the Microwave, that looks awful!

Well, red wine if it’s too cold can taste astringent and bland, don’t bother putting it on the radiator for ten minutes which my mother always does – it doesn’t do anything! But try putting it in the microwave for 5 to 10 seconds or so.  This will help the wine open up and taste better than when it’s cold. I promise you many a Sommelier has discovered this trick, not that I would ever dream of doing this in a Fine Dining establishment... *cough*

So sit back, grab whatever you want, whenever you fancy it, get talking around some rescued wine and watch the spectacular fireworks in the microwave because somebody forgot to take the foil off that bottle of red...