August 2007

I'm deathly afraid of making the same mistake with the grape wine as I did with the dandelion. I suspect that I fermented it with too much air touching it. So on Saturday I racked the grape wine into two gallon jugs, filled all the way to the top.

There was alcohol in it already, and I suppose that the main ferment was about at an end. Very soupy bright green color. The siphoning went a little better.

When my neighbors Mike and Ben found out that I was making dandelion wine, they graciously offered the grapes from their backyard for my winemaking purposes.

So I took them up on it. On the 14th I went over and picked a whole bunch of grapes. We've got this metal tub that we sometimes use to ice down drinks when we have a party. I filled that up until I couldn't fit any more grapes in it without them spilling over the sides. Then I sat down and started to destem them. Then, when I realized how long this was going to take, I began to regret picking all those grapes.

Cristy came home and saw what I was doing and naiively offered to help. We took the operation into the kitchen, sat down with an array of buckets and tubs and crocks for rinsing, for stems, for destemmed grapes. And we sat there and destemmed until midnight. Cristy tried to go to bed at least twice. "Are you ready to go to bed?" she asked. "No," I grimly replied. "When are you going to quit?" she said. "When this is done," I said. Then she felt guilty and sat down again and started pulling grapes. Little tiny grapes, most about the size of chickpeas. I kept wondering how this is normally done. There must be a machine. But how was it done before machines? In his book First Steps in Winemaking, C.J.J. Berry simply says, "remove the stems." He doesn't give any advice about the best way to go about this. I sat there and pulled grapes and tried to remember how my college roommate did it.

When I was in college, I lived in a house that had some grapes in the yard. We all ignored them except for Tammy, who picked them one year, put them in a tub and smashed them with her feet like you see in movies. I don't remember if Tammy removed the stems before she crushed them. She put the juice in a five-gallon carboy with the bubbler and all that and left it there. A couple months later, she moved out and left the wine behind. That fall, my other roommate Ingrid decided that she was going to serve the wine at a party. Someone fit a tap to the top of the carboy (or maybe it was just a siphon) and it was served in the backyard to a bunch of loutish college students. I remember thinking that it was too soon to drink the wine. Anyway, the wine was good enough for students like us, whose high water mark of taste in alcoholic beverages was Mickey's malt liquor or whatever came in a 40-ounce bottle.

My grandfather also made wine, but all I have in my brain regarding that is a vague memory of people not liking it.

More recently, a friend who worked as a nurse in Saudi Arabia in the 80s told me that her roommate made wine from grape juice. They put it in a bottle and put a latex glove over the top. When the glove stood up, that's when they knew the wine was ready to drink. I asked her how long that was, and she said, "about three weeks."

When we were done, we crushed the grapes with our hands, poured them into a bucket with a lid and went to bed.

The next night we squeezed juice out of the smashed up grapes. We did this by taking a cotton towel, scooping a bunch of grape must into it, and squeezing the juice out if it. Another tedious process, but really this was nothing compared to to picking the grapes. We had it done in no time, and ended up with two-and-a-half gallons of grape juice.

I was planning to put all the wine in the glass carboy I have, the one I used for the first ferment on the dandelion. But I didn't really have a funnel that was big enough to pour into without spilling a lot of the juice. So I opted to put it in my plastic fermenter.

What I should have done is poured out the whole thing into three gallon-jugs, and topped off the third so that there wasn't any air touching the liquid. At least that's what the books say. But I didn't have three gallon jugs to spare.

I checked the specific gravity. It says that I can expect about 10% alcohol, which is not bad. I decided not to add any sugar. I added a half packet of champaigne yeast, sealed the bucket and put it away on a shelf in the shop.

Over the next three or four days the shop smelled like baking bread. The yeast smell was incredible. I'm going to go buy some more gallon bottles to rack it into in a couple weeks. And a bigger funnel.

Last night's dinner was chili cooked in the solar cooker using a bastardized version of the recipe for Hard Time's vegetarian chili.

I couldn't figure out why Hard Times would give away their recipes for free until sometime after I'd read the recipe for the fourth or fifth time and realized that it called for a 6-ounce bag of "Hard Times spice mix," which, presumably, is only available from Hard Times. However, I was not intimidated by the bullies at Hard Times, Inc. I whined about it to Cristy, who concocted a mixture of chili powder, oregano and cumin, to which I added a healthy helping of chili flakes and some minced garlic. I cut the whole recipe in half, so I used approximately 3 ounces of said mixture.

Got it in the oven around 10:45am. Kind of late, but I was busy.

Checked on it a little before 4pm. A few important notes here.

1. The pot was so hot that when the condensation from inside the oven bag dripped onto it, the water sizzled.

2. When I cracked the lid on the pot, the steam that came out was hot enough to cause permanent injury.

3. The combination of heat, condensation, metal and plastic makes for a sticky mess if you happen to drop the lid the wrong way into the chili, the design of these oval oven pots (or whatever they're called) being such that it is possible to drop the lid into the pot.

4. Once I opened the oven bag, the pot never really got hot again - the built-up heat within the oven bag is really the key to success.

The chili turned out pretty good. We took it over to the neighbor's house and ate it while watching the final installment of Hell's Kitchen, which was somewhat gratifying because I picked Rock for the winner during the first episode.

The dandelion wine has had a rough few months. It sat out in the shop during the entire two months we were in the motel, which was probably not the best place for it since the temperature in there could get up to around 90F during the day. I racked it into a smaller gallon bottle and keep it inside now. It may be my imagination, but it seems like it used to be clearer, then it got hot and became cloudy like this but was even darker, and now it has lighted up considerably, maybe even cleared some. I don't know. When I racked it it tasted like wine, for whatever that's worth. It tasted more like oranges than anything else.