The sloes are shaping up well on at least most of the bushes inspected. So, more sloe gin this year. Or a more expansive liqueur which includes, as well as sloes, blackberries, elderberries and crab apples. And very welcome, too. And then, by chance, you come across another use for the sloe, practised a couple of centuries ago, according to William Cobbett: to make port wine.
First he gives a little disquisition on the qualities of sloes. They have "a little plum-like pulp, which covers a little roundish stone, pretty near as hard as iron, with a small kernel in the inside of it. This pulp, which I have eaten many times as a boy until my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth and my lips were pretty nearly glued together, is astringent beyond the powers of alum. The juice expressed from this pulp is of a greenish black, and mixed with water, in which a due proportion of longwood has been steeped, receiving, in addition, a sufficient proportion of cheap French brandy, makes the finest Port Wine in the world, makes the whiskered bucks, while they are picking their teeth after dinner, smack their lips observing that the wine is beautifully rough and that they like a dry wine that has a good body."
Well, you wouldn't doubt William Cobbett, but apart from anything else, how do you get cheap French brandy? But Cobbett is mainly interested in blackthorn plants as the best possible hedging. He says, and this was in a book called The Woodlands (1825), that, however, while you may then have bought a sack of hawthorn seed for a shilling or half-a-crown at the most, to get a number of blackthorn sloes, equal in number to the hawthorn berries in the sack, would "in almost any part of the kingdom cost five, ten, nay twenty pounds."
It may well be, as a landscaper friend maintains, that you get successful propagation only by suckering the blackthorn. Certainly if you buy a set of thorn quicks, asking for a mixture of hawthorn and blackthorn, you may find that you get ten of the former for one of the latter. But blackthorn makes a fine hedge, particularly because of its long, tough thorns. Quotations from the Oxford Book of Nature Writing, edited by Richard Mabey. £8.25.