Do you remember The Good Life? The BBC1 sitcom starring Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal, who kept us all laughing throughout the late 1970s with their sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyle in the middle of Surbiton. They were the middle-class couple who shunned convention by digging up their front and back gardens and growing fruits and vegetables where the lawn should have been. They then acquired chickens, pigs, a goat named Geraldine and a cockerel they named Lenin, and proceeded to turn their garden into a small, smallholding which sometimes actually paid its way.

The Goods generated their electricity from the methane they captured from animal waste, knitted their own clothes without too much success and continually raised a glass of home-made peapod burgundy to their self-sufficient lifestyle. It was all great fun, particularly as this show introduced the joys of wine making to the masses. Viewers rushed off in their thousands to buy demijohns and yeast in hope of producing their own wine too.

At the time popular shops such as Boots actually had their own home-made wine-making section which stocked not just glass demijohns, but corks, air-locks, rubber tubing to syphon the wine from one demijohn to another and special gadgets to insert the corks into the finished bottles. They sold a fantastic selection of attractive labels too.

Sadly, Boots no longer sells wine-making equipment. The fad has passed. Most enthusiasts now go on-line to get their corks and airlocks; they visit car boot sales for the glass demijohns. However, now we are all having to tighten our belts, owing to rises in the price of food and fuel, perhaps we will all begin looking back to The Good Life and begin asking what we can make for ourselves that will reduce our weekly shopping bill.

Home-made wine is certainly one way of reducing the bill, as most recipes call for just two to three pounds of sugar, a sachet of dried yeast, a lemon and three or four pounds of fruit or vegetables. If you can get the fruit or vegetables free, then the cost is minimal - certainly no more than 75p to a pound a bottle.

he peapod wine that flowed so freely in the Goods' suburban home was aptly chosen, as peapods cost nothing and are usually thrown on to the compost heap. What viewers may not have realised, however, is that to make a gallon of peapod wine you have to start with five pounds of pea pods. Work it out for yourself - pods are light! The Goods would have to have grown a massive amount of peas to make just one solitary gallon of wine. As regular viewers to the show will recall, they had a cellar full of the stuff. I guess this is where one suspends disbelief.

The late Mollie Harris, from Eynsham, who wrote extensively on home-made wine, made her peapod wine by boiling up five pounds of peapods in a gallon of water, then straining off the liquid when the pods were thoroughly cooked and tender. When the liquid had cooled she would add three pounds of sugar, the juice of a large grapefruit and half an ounce of yeast, stir well and then let the yeast do its work for about five days. This liquid would next be strained through muslin into a sterile demijohn to which an airlock was fixed. She would then store it in a cool, dark place for about four months. The result was a delightfully light wine which, as Mollie observed, resembled hock.

Like all Mollie's recipes, following the methods her mother and grandmother taught her, this peapod wine was made the simple way. Mollie didn't go in for fancy ingredients, special wine yeasts or chemicals, and used only produce gathered from the fields and hedges, along with any surplus produce from her garden. I have made them all over the years, and the delightful thing is that they really do work.

Nettle wine is another of her recipes where the main ingredient comes free. This was originally made as a tonic to clear the blood and ease the digestion. It has a delightful nutty, sherry flavour.

To make this, you need half a bucket of nettle tops (picked while wearing gloves), two lemons, four pounds of sugar, half an ounce of root ginger, half an ounce of yeast and a gallon of water. This golden wine is made in the same way as the peapod, by extracting the flavour of the leaves by boiling for about 30 minutes, then adding the rest of the ingredients and allowing the wine to ferment. Another low-cost wine that Mollie made often was tea wine. She saved any left-over tea in the pot until she had collected a gallon. To that she would add a pound of chopped raisins, four pounds of sugar, the juice of four lemons and two grapefruit and an ounce of yeast. I have no idea why this wine calls for twice as much yeast as many of her other recipes, but it does. The result is a wine which tastes very similar to nettle wine.

Naturally, the queen of home-made wines is blackberry, made from wild blackberries found in the hedgerows during the autumn. If made properly, using at least four pounds of fruit to every gallon of water, this wine tastes as good as Bordeaux and sometimes Burgundy if you are lucky.

Blackberry wine is made by pouring a gallon of boiling water over the fruit and leaving it for three or four days. You then strain off the liquid and stir into it three pounds of sugar and an ounce of yeast. Once strained into a demijohn after the initial fermention, this wine needs to rest for about six months before it's ready to drink.

The most important thing to remember when making home-made wine is to keep everything sterile. Sterilising tablets are vital for cleaning out the airlocks and demijohns. The merest spot of dirt left in a demijohn can turn the wine sour. Then the only thing it is good for is filling the slug traps in the garden.

Mollie's book A Drop O'Wine (Chatto & Windus, 1983) is no longer in print, but you may find a second-hand copy on the Internet.