Got 3 cups of bulk honey at Wheatsville.
Got someone at the Wheatsville deli counter to give us a used one-gallon plastic container that formerly contained mustard (we washed it out well to get rid of the smell).
Thoroughly dissolved the honey in 12 cups of water.
Covered the jar with a cloth to keep out flies and secured it with a rubber band, then set the jar aside for a week to see if it would start fermenting on its own.
Nothing much had happened after a week, so we added a pint of crushed organic blackberries hoping the yeasts living on their skins would start the fermentation. That got the mix bubbling well within a few more days.
After the mix was obviously fermenting, we added it to a clean one-gallon cider jug. The handy funnel we used included a strainer that caught most of the blackberry fragments.
After filling the jug, we capped it with a rubber stopper and an airlock purchased at a beer- and wine-making supply store, and set the jug aside. As the mixture fermented, carbon dioxide slowly bubbled through the airlock. We were going through a spell of chilly weather at the time, so the process was pretty slow. Sometimes we would take the jug out on the porch to warm up in the sun.
We kept tasting the wine on a weekly basis. At first, it mostly tasted like slightly effervescent and yeasty sugar water, and after five weeks some complexity had developed in the flavor: still quite sweet, but with darker honey notes and a noticeable acidity. We carefully decanted the wine into two and a half screw-top wine bottles and put the dregs on the compost pile. The final wine is good straight-up or as a mixer with liquor and citrus juices. Give it a try!
