In a small leafy village in Lithuania, not so far from Kedainiai, there is a small house with a big garden full of fruit trees and windfall. The garden is verdant, the house is old and the stairs are uneven.
Step inside and you will find that there are some rooms that have are recently used, clean, tidy and even with new floors, but venture up those steep uneven stairs and you will find yourself in a slightly different world, one where there are some things that have not been used or moved for decades, like a very small and very private museum.
Hunt through a few of those things and you might come across some hidden gems, like the group of big mysterious glass bottles huddled in one corner of a room, with tops wrapped in plastic and covered in sheets to protect them from the sun. What could the strangely coloured liquid that they contain possibly be?
A quick sniff gives some clues, it’s either rocket fuel or some kind of pretty potent alcohol, and a little bit of investigation confirms that this is in fact some homemade wine and not that Granny has been running some clandestine cosmetology programme. Nobody is sure what the ‘wine’ was made from, nobody has any idea what the alcohol content might be, what we can work out is that it has been waiting undisturbed in these bottles for about 30 years, waiting for this moment.
It could be disgusting, it could be vinegar, could it even be dangerous? Of course there is only one way to find out and why put off until tomorrow what we could taste today, so…
It’s strong! We don’t have a hydrometer to hand but we don’t need one to know that this isn’t just your average supermarket wine strength. It’s surprisingly sweet, but not sugary, it’s far more complicated than that. It doesn’t look great at all, but there are two things that we can be very clear about, this wine definitely tastes much better than it looks and it definitely makes you smile!
We feel that it would be a tragedy to just leave this wonderful liquid here to eventually turn bad and so we have devised a plan to liberate it from it’s hiding place, mix, filter and bottle it and then to use it at a future special event.
Curious – what do you plan to do with it?
Oh, we plan to drink it at a secret future special event!