Meanwhile, it is still warm down on the now nearly deserted beaches. The tourist throng of August has left, the children are back in school and I have the empty strand to myself as I take my early morning stroll.
The brambles in the hedgerows lining my country lane are presenting the last of a bumper crop of blackberries that has been remarkable for its abundance and sweet lusciousness of the fruit. I picked the first blackberry in the last week of June, (five weeks earlier than last year), and have been cropping every week since. My garden shed now harbours 16 gallons of blackberry wine that I have made during the summer and racked after fermenting out to dryness. I shall leave it to mature and bottle it next summer when I begin next year's blackberry winemaking.
All indications are that this will prove to be a striking 'vintage'; full-bodied, smooth but strong in flavour and rich in colour. I look forward to exhibiting a bottle at the Isle of Wight Agricultural Show next summer.
I am still picking blackberries, though the fruit is less luscious than the first crop, reflecting the dryness of this past summer. Now that it is apple-picking time, I shall make use the last of the blackberries and the first of the apples to make a lighter Blackberry & Apple wine.
Next weekend sees the last of the Isle of Wight's many summer festivals. This is the charming Apple Days Festival at Afton Park situated in the end of this beautiful island near the famed dinosaur cliffs, which continue to provide a treasure trove of fossils. This is a typical rural event celebrating the English Apple - the sweet Cox's Orange Pippin and the tart green cooking apple, the Bramley.
Down at the end of the lane passing my cottage, where it peters out into dense copses of sloe shrubs and rough down land, I have discovered a solitary crab-apple tree, its branches heavy with bright red fruit. I was there the other evening to collect sloes to make up a Christmas bottle of sloe liqueur to my grandmother's old recipe when I first spotted it. My grandmother used to make a crab apple wine each autumn and I am about to embark on making a batch myself. As with rhubarb, it is best to use the fruit to produce a dry, rather than sweet, wine. Crab apples, like rhubarb, blend superbly with other fruits like apricots, blackberries or prunes for wine making. Used on their own however, their astringency makes them eminently suitable for the production of a delightful dry aperitif.
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