Minimum equipment: A purpose-built plastic bucket with a lid. Hasta be the right kind of plastic so as not to impart any off flavours.
Some one-gallon glass demijohns (squat glass bottles with rabbit-ear handles) and fermentation locks.
Sterilizing powder. Again, get the purpose-made stuff. Wild organisms living in your wine are the death.
Some clear plastic tubing for siphoning.
Wine yeast (baker’s yeast is not a good substitute, flavour-wise).
Campden tablets (these are for sterilizing the wine itself, not the equipment)
Used wine bottles and new corks, plus a corking machine and a mallet.
I’d recommend bramble berries (I believe they’re the same as we call “blackberries”) for both novice and experienced winemaker. You also need cane sugar as most wild berries don’t have anything like enough sugar to ferment to a worthwhile alcohol content.
You can make an acceptable drink as follows:
Sterilize all your gear.
Pick 3lb of bramble berries, wash 'em in cold water and then boil up a couple of pints of water. Mash the berries with whatever’s to hand, putting the pulp in the fermenting bucket. Pour over the boiling water and continue mashing - this helps extract juice from the fruit. Add cold water to make up to a half-gallon of roughly blood-heat mess and add yeast as per instructions on the packet. Some yeasts you can add directly, others prefer to be started off in blood-heat water with a little sugar. Put the lid on it and give it three or four days, lifting the lid a couple of times a day to break up the raft of fruit which will be forming and give the whole thing a stir with a wooden or plastic spoon.
Now siphon the liquid off the pulp into the gallon demijohn. Make up to one gallon with two pounds of sugar dissolved in water (bring the water to the boil, add the sugar, dissolve it, cool to blood heat or below). Note: It may be a good idea to reserve a couple of pints of the mixture (“must”) in a separate bottle. Cotton wool is not a bad stopper for such.
Leave in a warm-ish but not too hot place and watch it go ballistic as the yeast goes yummy-yummy-yummy over the sugar hit. Your fermentation lock will be bubbling like crazy. Beware of letting things get super-critical as you don’t want froth bubbling out of the fermentation lock. When things cool down a little, add the reserved must. Then leave it alone until the fermentation has pretty much died off.
Now siphon the mixture off the sediment that has fallen to the bottom of the demijohn (this process is called “racking”) and let it continue to ferment, if it will. You may need to repeat this process a few times until mounting alcohol levels finally kill off the yeast.
Rack once again and add a crushed Campden tablet to the wine, following the instructions on the packet. This is to make sure the yeast is good and dead. In-bottle fermentation can give you blown corks (if you’re lucky) or exploding glass bottles (if you’re not).
Siphon the wine into bottles and cork them. Label them up and leave them alone for as long as you have the willpower, then open up a bottle and find out if it’s all been worth it.
Usually things will not go wrong as long as you keep everything surgically clean and keep air and vinegar flies away from your must. For a list of pitfalls and methods for dealing with curable problems, seriously, get a book. There are many excellent ones which will answer all your questions, including some you didn’t know you had, and also give recipes (the above is a little hit and miss). Many ingredients are indeed usable - I have made walnut-leaf before now with some success (hint of apple and ginger, if you’re curious).
