Win a personalised bottle of Champagne

This month, we’re pleased to be linking up with Say It With Champers to offer one of our readers a personalised bottle of champagne.

Say it with Champers can provide bespoke bottles of champagne (or mini prosecco) for every occasion. And wouldn’t winning a bottle at the end of this month really hit the spot in the run up to Christmas?!

After the way 2020 has unfolded – we’d all happily lift a glass of fizz on New Year’s Eve to see this unprecedented year out!

Perhaps you, or someone you know, is getting married next year – a personalised bottle of champagne would be a welcome and fitting wedding gift.

If you’re vegan, Say It With Champers has a suitable bottle full of sparkles for you. The brut Neveux-Rousseau produced in Jonquery is available exclusively from the company.

To be in with a shot at winning a personalised bottle of bubbly, comment below saying what you’ve recently celebrated… or hope to celebrate in the near future. It’s as simple as that!

Just UK-based entrants allowed this month and, for obvious reasons, the competition is only open to adults aged 18 and over. Good luck and cheers!

Personalised bottle of Champagne from Say It With Champers

Price Points: Supermarket Prosecco

In 2016, it was reported that the UK consumed 35% of all the Prosecco produced in Italy that year. The country exports 70% of its total yield – so that means half of what leaves the country comes to these shores.

When it comes to celebrating that special event with a bit of fizz, many people immediately turn to champagne. On some occasions, that can be great, of course. However, a really good Prosecco, Cava or English sparkling white wine certainly beats a mediocre champagne in our book. And it’s usually far more affordable, too.

In recent years, the British public has become much more comfortable shopping in discount high street shops – the likes of Primark, TK Maxx and the different pound shop chains. The same can be said of doing the weekly food shop – and two of these Proseccos are from Aldi & Lidl, whose reputations for an interesting range of products and value for money are now well established.

We can personally vouch for all three of these bottles of supermarket prosecco – sampled, of course, entirely in the name of public service!

Of the trio, we enjoyed the Morrisons bottle the most; crisp and dry with a lovely pear flavour. In fact, it came top in this year’s Good Housekeeping ‘Best Prosecco’ review.

Allini Prosecco Spumante, extra dry: £5.99, Lidl
An easy-drinking prosecco with lovely fresh pear aromas and full of fizz.
Organic Prosecco: £7.99, Aldi (Sweetness: 1)
Pear and green apple are followed by aromas of acacia flowers and honeycomb.
Grown with no pesticides or herbicides used in the vineyard, the grapes are predominately hand picked and gently pressed to ensure only the highest quality of juice is used. The winery is also committed to using renewable energy wherever possible.
The Best Valdobbiadene Prosecco, 75cl: £8.00, Morrisons (Sweetness: 2)
Apple blossom aromas with vibrant green apple and pear flavours.

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Prices & links correct at time of publication.

The Best Valdobbiadene Prosecco 75cl
£8.00

Organic Prosecco
£7.99

Allini Prosecco Spumante, extra dry
£5.99

The Best Valdobbiadene Prosecco 75cl
£8.00

Organic Prosecco
£7.99

Allini Prosecco Spumante, extra dry
£5.99

The Best Valdobbiadene Prosecco 75cl
£8.00

Organic Prosecco
£7.99

Allini Prosecco Spumante, extra dry
£5.99

The Best Valdobbiadene Prosecco 75cl
£8.00

Organic Prosecco
£7.99

Allini Prosecco Spumante, extra dry
£5.99

The Best Valdobbiadene Prosecco 75cl
£8.00

Organic Prosecco
£7.99

Allini Prosecco Spumante, extra dry
£5.99

Simple sloe gin recipe

The first frosts hit this part of the country this week, I’ve been eagerly awaiting them. No, I’m not a great fan of chilly weather, I’ve just had my eye on a few little blackthorn bushes that grow along our lane.

Blackthorn berries (prunus spinosa) – better known as sloes – are the important ingredient in that Christmastime favourite, sloe gin. Back to those frosts… it’s recommended that you pick them after a spell of freezing temperatures, as this swells the berries and makes their skin split. If you don’t want to wait, you’ll need to prick each berry with a pin or skewer before steeping them in the gin. Letting the cold weather do the hard work is my preferred method!

Conveniently, for this post, we had half a bottle of Hortus gin left over from those almost forgotten summer gin & tonics. That’s just the right amount for the number of sloes I was able to forage – about 150 grams.

You add half the weight of sloes in sugar; i.e. 75 grams of sugar to 150 grams of berries. The amount of gin you add is much more flexible. Countryfile Magazine recommends 500 grams of sloes to a 70cl bottle of gin, River Cottage say around 325 grams per bottle and The Guardian 350 grams. The ratio that I used was about 300 grams to a bottle.

My sloe gin may just about be ready to crack open at Christmas. Next Christmas – or even the Christmas after that – is optimal time for the fruit to infuse with the alcohol.

Click here to save this sloe gin recipe to Pinterest

Simple sloe gin

Print recipe Pin recipe

Course Drinks

Cuisine British

Ingredients

150 g sloes
75 g caster sugar
35 cl half a bottle London dry gin

Instructions

Sterilise a bottle or Kilner/Le Parfait preserving jar
Rinse, drain and pat dry the sloes
Add the sloes, sugar and gin. Seal the cork/cap/lid and swirl the contents together for 30 seconds or so. Set aside in a cool, dry, dark spot
Each day for about a week, swirl the contents together for 10 seconds or so. Once all the sugar has completely dissolved, you can strain to remove the fruit and store the sloe gin (for years... if you can resist the urge to crack it open!)

Keyword alcohol, forage, gin, sloes

Price Points: Wine racks

If you’re anything like us, wine doesn’t last long enough in the house to warrant a wine rack! Besides, we’ve previously always lived very close to shops – and usually only bought a bottle or two as and when we’re going to drink it. Perhaps with our new, more rural location, this item might become more essential for us.

However, what I do use wine racks for is my annual summer batch of elderflower cordial. Each late May/early June, I pick the wild, fragrant blooms to make cordial and occasionally champagne. So long as the cordial contains added citric acid and is stored in properly sterilised bottles, it will last until the following summer, when production happens all over again.

These are 3 of my favourite wine racks; I like each for different reasons. Starting with the IKEA model – it’s really cheap, yet is made of solid wood, so can be stained or painted to match your décor. In addition, it’s stackable, so it can be built to suit your space and/or bottle collection.

Number 2 is unobtrusive and minimalist; it’s made of thin black wire with hexagonal slots (a shape that gives a structure maximum strength in minimum space – think honeycomb). It gives the appearance of the bottles hovering in mid-air.

The final example has been designed to resemble a wooden wine box and can hold more bottles than the previous two. If this is your favourite of the trio, it would be a match made in heaven if your name also happens to be Chloé!

HUTTEN 9-bottle wine rack, solid wood: £8.00, IKEA
Black metal bottle rack: £33.00, Maison du Monde
Vinothek 12-bottle wine rack: £39.99, Wayfair

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Some of the links on our blog are affiliate links. We may receive a small commission - at no cost to you - if you click through and make a purchase.
Prices & links correct at time of publication.