"The pick of the crop"

Evelyn Hood visits Cairn O'Mohr winery and finds links to an Australian Desert, a redundant boiler-house and a misplaced "mh"!

Just a few to choose from.

The Cairn O'Mohr Winery, at East Inchmichael, Errol, is just off the A90 between Perth and Dundee. Seated on a sunny bench with proprietor Ron Gillies and with the perfume of raspberries heavy in the morning air, and a cup of tea to hand from Judith, Ron's wife and partner in Cairn O'Mohr Fruit Wines, I asked Ron about the origins of the Cairn O'Mohr wines enterprise.

"My brother Richard gave me a book on making fruit wines. Before then I'd been in partnership making wooden sheds with another brother, Grant. I've always been interested in woodwork."

That didn't surprise me. All around the wine shop entrance and the winery buildings, Ron's woodworking skills are much in evidence, including some massive faces carved out of great tree trunks.

I then asked a question I'd been longing to for a very long time - where did the name Cairn O' Mohr come from?

"I was in Australia for a year," Ron replied, "and took a job with a Western Australian geophysical survey company, surveying the Great Sandy Desert. In the desert I sighted a big rock in a very, very flat place. It became a permanent trig. point and I got to name it. I called it Cairn o' Mhor - the big rock - the name had a kind of dramatic ring to it and we chose it for our wine because we liked the name I'd invented in Australia. But because the mh is pronounced v in Gaelic, we swapped round the o and the h- hence Cairn O'Mohr."

The early wines

"The first wine I made was a citrus wine - oranges, lemons and grapefruit and it was the first wine I'd ever tasted that I actually liked. So, I tried other recipes and found the whole thing a fascinating hobby. I shared the wines with friends and they liked them. Eighteen years ago, with the business skills I'd developed making and selling sheds in partnership with my brother, Grant, I decided to see if I could sell the wine.

"The great thing to me was that it could be made out of all kinds of local country produce - plus lots of things you wouldn't think would make wine, like oak leaves, for instance."

How did he begin marketing it?

"First of all, I simply went round licensed premises with a basket of samples. The Spar grocer in Errol took in some. Jonathan Stewart at the Fisherman's in Broughty Ferry and what used to be McGonagle's in the Perth Road took it. I'll always be very grateful to the people who first took it on.

"Today, anyone who wants it on the shelf is welcome to stock it. People want to be an exclusive stockist in an area or a town, but my approach is to keep the customers happy by having a stock where it's handiest for them.

"Our biggest single customer is Asda. The manager of the Dundee Asdas lived in Errol. He loved the wines and was determined to stock them. Thanks to his enthusiasm we are now in all Scottish Asdas and have a good working relationship with the Scottish Asda stores. This is the only supermarket chain we supply and they deserve some credit for their local sourcing policies."

Judith and Ron Gillies.

Before I met up with Ron and Judith, I had toured the shop at the winery and noted the number of gold and silver awards their various wines won had in 2004 and 2005. Given that their competition is from fruit wineries all over the country, theirs is a remarkable achievement. What, I asked, were the first wines Ron had for sale?

"We concentrated on local fresh ingredients - the Carse of Gowrie is famous for its soft fruit. We used strawberries, raspberries, brambles, elderberries, spring oak leaves and autumn oak leaves - these were the basis of the original wines. We now make interesting variations and have twelve varieties of wine in production. Added to which we make a non-alcoholic sparkling elderflower wine which won the gold award at the Great Taste Awards in 2005.

"We made an oak and elderflower sparkling wine for our wedding. Everyone loved it, so we began producing it commercially. Judith also devised a strawberry and elderflower sparkling wine that is a lighter wine than straight strawberry. I reckon she did this so that she could beat me at backgammon - because while she's sipping the lighter wine she can still concentrate on the game while my mind heads for the hills after a couple of glasses of the stronger stuff."

And it's true that most of the Gillies's straight wines are around 14% and this alcohol content makes them a sipping rather than a gulping wine! I next asked who does what in the enterprise and was told that Judith, who trained as a doctor at Dundee University, is in charge of production. Nobody, it seems, was more surprised than Ron when she agreed "to pack it in and come and help me!"