Waging War With Wine

We have had a busy weekend getting ready for Halloween and just general cleaning.

The main mess in the kitchen has been wine. Not just the wine we are drinking, which is A LOT, but the wine we are making. Suddenly I have fermenters all over the place with yeast working hard to make sure we keep as little blood in our alcohol system as possible.

It started a few weeks back when all these people at church at plums up the ass. We decided we should make some plum wine. Afterall, that is the wine that won Grand Champion the last two years at the fair. If you can't beat them, make the same wine as them and try to beat them that way. That what we always say.

So I gathered up enough plums to make six gallons. According to the recipe book, that was 24 pounds o'plumses. It turned out in our case that we are fermenting se7en gallons of Plum Wine. I have a six gallon carboy and a one gallon jug next to it.

The pulp from the Syrah grapes we got not only produced juice but it seemed to produce fruit flies by the copius hundreds. The problem was that I had the mesh bag full of grape pulp sitting in my eight gallon bucket. I was opening it often to squeeze the bag and extract as much juice as possible.

Everytime I opened the lid and squeezed, I was getting pulp dripping down the side of the bucket. It made for quite a sticky mess on the floor. I finally got smart and laid down some plastic.

Saturday night I racked as much of the juice as I could out of the bucket and into the six gallon carboy. It was a really slow process as the syphon kept clogging due to the amount of free floating pulp and the stuff that had sunk to the bottom. It was clear from the start that we had more than six gallons. I got a second five gallon carboy and ended up with close to two more gallons of juice. That finally allowed me to get the pulp laden plastic off the floor. The fruit flies should be gone soon. Or they are settling in.

Susan spent most of the weekend cleaning while I was outside avoiding cleaning. My task was to set up the flying ghosts. I got the post holders pounded into the ground on Saturday and placed the posts today. Then I set about the job of stringing the fishing line.

With Susan's help I got it strung. We put our first test ghost into place and it fell off before going half way around the first wheel.

I am having definite issues with tension...both on the string and in my forehead.

We finally had to give up due to rain. Rain and wind will play havoc with the ghosts so we are hoping both will stay away when the 31st comes.

There is still lots to do...and then we'll be dead!