Ginger wine is a real blast from the past, and easy to make at home!

As a young man down in Devon, Hugh Osborne was introduced to Stones Ginger Wine by his grandparents. That sweet, fiery, intense drink seems to be unfashionable now but, like a mug of proper homemade hot chocolate, nothing else banishes the Winter blues in quite the same way. As part of their drive for self-sufficiency, Hugh & Fiona set out a few years ago to make their own ginger wine. The recipe needed a few iterations to get absolutely right, but they now produce not just the wine, but the ginger to make it too.

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GROWING GINGER

If you want to try growing something new in 2026, we recommend ginger. We honestly don't know why we didn't start growing ginger years ago. It grows really well in a glasshouse, produces a valuable crop in a small space and is remarkably simple to grow. Ginger can be grown from the commercially available stuff in supermarkets so it's cheap to try. It's worth noting that ginger sold in shops can be treated with an anti-germinant. A vigorous scrub under the tap with a stiff nail brush soon removes this.

Ginger is a big plant needing a big pot but to keep things affordable we use £1.00 B&Q builders' buckets. We drill half a dozen 10mm holes in the base for drainage and throw in a few crocks or broken bits of polystyrene to save them from blocking. We get the best results from a sharp growing medium (pure garden compost tends to waterlog and that can cause the ginger to rot) so we mix our own compost with some grit. Our greenhouses are unheated, and ginger needs some warmth to get going so we start each piece in a 15 cm pot indoors in February. We break up larger pieces of ginger so that each has a couple of “lobes” and plant them 1cm below the surface of damp compost. This gets them off to a flying start and we then transplant these into buckets in a greenhouse in April.