Wine underway

Today, I finally got around to crushing the grapes I picked at a neighbor's place on Friday. I also finally got around to picking my own grapes, into a separate bucket.

First, I must say that de-stemming and crushing a bucket of grapes is an absolutely wonderful experience. I sat outside on a stump, pulling clusters from one bucket and plucking them into a second bucket, one after another, just enjoying the solitude and allowing myself to get lost in thought. As I began crushing handfuls of grapes, making sure none of them eluded my fingers, I imagined these grapes as being my own sacrifice offered to God. All my work, all my difficulties, all my life...broken open and poured out, so the Winemaker could use the juice to make something far greater.

Anyway, as I suspected, the neighbor's grapes had a very low sugar content: the initial Brix reading on the refractometer, once they were all crushed together, was just 11. That's only half the sugar needed for a complete ferment. My own grapes, however, had a brix of 24 --- absolutely outstanding. (And given how many grapes I lost to sparrows and other birds, further evidence that I should've harvested them a week ago.) Unfortunately, I had 19.5 pounds of grapes from the neighbor...and only 3.5 pounds from my own vineyard. Extremely lame. I'll be fortunate to get even a gallon of wine altogether.

As 3.5# is far too little to ferment by itself, I crushed those grapes and added them to the ones from Ed's farm. I added some sulfites to stun the wild yeasts, and am allowing the bucket to stand overnight. Once the sugar leaches out, and the sulfites run their course, I'll take a final sugar reading for the entire must. Then I'll add the appropriate amount of sugar to get to 22 Brix, and also add the yeast. And then, hopefully, the ferment will begin.

The best part about winemaking? The smell of grape juice on my hands that will not go away, no matter how many times I wash them. And, of course, enjoying the finished wine. But you knew that already.

Gift Horse

I got a call the other day from an elderly farmer who lives around the corner from us. Ed is a widower, well into his 80s, whose health has not been good in recent years. He can hardly walk, and usually leans on a walker when he does so. But he can still drive his pickup truck, and uses a riding lawn mower to get around his property. Come harvest time, he will be out in the fields driving a combine. Yes, he'll need help climbing up into the cockpit. But once he's there, look out. The corn is coming in.

The wonderful thing about neighbors like Ed is that they can tell stories about what the area used to be like. As a boy (before the area was electrified), he used to milk several cows each morning by hand, before school. He helped build one of the outbuildings on our farm.

Ed's farm has all kinds of fruit trees, planted decades ago, which produce much more fruit than he can use. In fact, we first met him a few years back, when he pulled into our driveway in his pickup truck and growled at my wife, "You want any cherries?"

Surprised, Mrs. Yeoman Farmer asked, "Did you bring them? Or do we need to pick them?"

Ed replied with something along the lines of, "H---, no I didn't bring them! Come on over and pick them off the trees!" After several afternoons spent picking cherries and other fruits at Ed's farm, we discovered that under the gruff exterior the guy has a heart of pure gold. He loves kicking back in his riding mower and watching as Mrs. Yeoman Farmer and our kids climb ladders and fill buckets with fruit. He also enjoys our eggs, and bringing over loads of windfall apples to throw down to our chickens.

Anyway, back to the most recent call. He told me that the wine grapes were ripe, and that some of them were even drying up into raisins, so I'd better get over there and get them if I want them. So, I found my clippers, a couple of five gallon buckets, and dusted off my refractometer. The refractometer is a wonderful instrument which measures the Brix (sugar content) of any liquid. Just smear some juice on it, look through the eyepiece while sun shines on the juice, and you'll be able to read the Brix.

It took Ed some time to climb down the steps to his riding mower, but he refused to let me help in any way other than holding the front door open. Then he put the mower in gear, and led the way to the grape arbor. I didn't want to come across too much like I was looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I did need to know the Brix of the grapes before I could make wine. As Ed began picking grape clusters (still sitting on his riding mower), I tested individual grapes from several different vines. Unfortunately, the Brix was only about half (12) of the ideal (22) sugar content for making wine. Glancing around, I immediately understood why: the vines had been planted so long ago, a stand of pine trees had grown all around it and was now blocking the sunlight. There simply wasn't enough sun getting through to get the grapes as ripe as they should be. Again, not wanting to trash the gift horse, I simply said, "The sugar's a little low, but I can fix that by adding some at the start of the ferment. These sure are delicious, aren't they?" (Indeed, the sugar content wasn't bad for an eating/table grape.)

I put the refractometer away, and we went to work. It only took about a half hour, and I only got about five gallons of grapes, but what I enjoyed the most was talking with Ed. As usual, he opined on just about everything --- and, as usual, we agreed about nearly everything. This is the most Republican county in the state, and Ed is about as conservative as they come.

Once home , I took the refractometer out to my own vineyard and tested a few of my own grapes. The Brix was very close to ideal, but it doesn't look like I'll bet getting much of a harvest this year. Because I'm not sure how well those grapes from Ed's arbor will turn out for winemaking, I hesitate to combine his grapes with mine. What I'll probably do is pick and crush mine into a separate bucket, crush his, and see how much must we're looking at (and just how my total sugar content compares to his). At that point, I'll make a decision about combining them. But given the small amounts, it doesn't make much sense to do separate ferments.

Neighbors like these are a big part of what makes country life so rich and enjoyable. I think I'm going to put Artistic Girl on the back of our tandem bike, ride over there, and give Ed a dozen eggs. He'll probably try to pay me for them, but I'm not going to let him.

Just Plain Busted

Sometimes, unlike the situation with the busted pipe I recently blogged about, it's just plain impossible to turn a lemon into lemonade.

We have several grape vines growing right behind the house, along a fence that subdivides the property. As these vines are so close to the house, I've been able to give them lots of attention the last few years. They've gotten plenty of water, and I've been able to protect them from Japanese Beetles. They're far and away the healthiest vines on the property, because they've been close enough to get so much care.

Until this morning, when I went out to do the chores and discovered one of them had been utterly destroyed. It was only six feet from the back door, and our dog Scooter always sleeps at the foot of it. At first glance, it looked okay...just a little wilted.

But something was wasn't quite right, so I took a closer look. The roots had been totally dug up, and the two stalks of the vine were snapped. Even quite a bit of the bark had been stripped off --- almost like a deer or goat had attacked it. But a deer or goat would've devoured the leaves first; and besides, all the goats were secure. And deer never come this close to the house. And since when has a deer or goat dug up a vine from the roots?

I couldn't prove it was Scooter, but I was highly suspicious. It also could've been Tabasco, who's always digging up everything on the trail of mouse and rat nests. Between Tabasco's digging and Scooter's chewing, it could've been a team destruction effort.

This particular vine didn't have a lot of fruit clusters on it, but it was the principle of the thing: I'd planted this vine, watered it, weeded it, pruned it, and cultivated it for years. It was beautiful, and it was thriving.

Sitting with the sheep later this morning, I had the chance to reflect on the vine and what the incident might be trying to say. On a farm, this kind of thing happens all the time: you spend months or years caring for some living thing (be it an animal, a bush, or a crop), but it's a living thing. You go to bed and everything's fine...and come out the next morning and it's dead. We've had more than one beautiful ram drop dead from bloat or parasites. Sometimes there is a dead hen in the chicken house in the morning; no sign of struggle or predation...it just died in the night. In the blink of an eye, we've lost two different dogs to collisions with cars. I came home one afternoon and surprised a hawk devouring one of our ducks in the driveway. Our first mother goose sat on a nest for weeks, and her eggs were nearly ready to hatch, when I came out one morning to discover coyotes had torn her to pieces like a feather pillow.

I could continue this this list, but you get the picture: to have a farm is to have a constant education in the virtue of detachment. As you toil and "husband" your livestock and produce, you must never succumb to the temptation of admiring that handiwork and thinking it was all your own invincible doing. Because it can all be taken away overnight. This is something I was largely insulated from when I lived in the city, as I think is the case for most city-dwellers. But the things of this earth, even the ones that you've worked so hard to care for (and perhaps especially those things) really are passing away. And that's a good thing to reflect on. We sure get plenty of chances to do so on the farm.

And now I've got to take these grape branches and feed them to the goats.

And With Spring...

It's time to shovel out the goat stall. Amazing how much bedding has accumulated since we cleared it out last summer. The goat kids are four weeks old now, and we want to get them and Queen Anne's Lace The Goat out of the little stall and back into the larger area that includes access to the outside. The kids are doing very well, and are bundles of energy. They really need more space, but I just haven't had time to get the larger stall ready; we wanted to get all the old bedding out, and lots of nice clean bedding down, before bringing them into it.

The solution: I've been chipping away at it, day by day, as a nice afternoon break from office work. It's remarkable how wonderful it is to take a pitchfork and drive it into that stuff; there's something about good physical labor that really helps clear one's mind at the end of a long day.

One wheelbarow load at a time, I've been taking it from the barn to my vineyard that's fairly close by. I'm averaging about 2-3 wheelbarow loads per day. I think that's the key lesson I've learned from trying combine a small farm with a small consulting practice: stop waiting for a big chunk of time before you tackle a project, and don't be afraid to do a little at a time. Bit by bit, that horrible old bedding is disappearing --- and, one row at a time, the vineyard is getting mulched. Here is Double Play, hanging out on what's left of the old bedding. Note how deep it is, and how much is still left to do.

The stuff at the bottom of the bedding is basically composted, it's so far deteriorated. Closer to the top, it's still basically rotting hay and straw. While not perfect organic compost that could be used in the garden, it makes a nice mulch for the vineyard. The composted portion provides nutrients for the soil, while the intact portion blocks weeds and absorbs rainwater. And over time, the rainwater will slowly leach additional nutrients out of the mulch and into the vineyard soil.