Wine Night

We are taking a night off from sanding in order to pursue another of our interests, the making of alcohol. In this case, wine. To be more specific, Piesporter.

Susan has thrown herself into a festive frenzy with the arrival of my Birthday Week. On Sunday, I received a lovely bunch of chocolate dipped strawberries and apricots. These were of course, hand dipped by Susan. Yesterday, I received a Piesporter Wine Kit. Here on Square Root Day (3x3=09), it is the third day of my Birthday Week and I have not as yet received anything...but it's still early.

It seems like a good night to start the wine though. This way, we will have a fully semi-aged home made wine for the Summer Solstice Party. In fact, I guess I could record the event here as well as on my usual wine manifest that I keep of each wine we make.

Before that, let me briefly update the stairs project. Last night, I had a good but short night of sanding as I went through all my remaining sandpaper rather quickly. All the treads are done and many of the risers are semi-finished. I have to get into the corners and some areas that the belt sander cannot reach.

I have already purchased another round of sandpaper and so I can begin again tomorrow. Tomorrow is an excellent night for sanding as the moon will be in just the right place and there's not much on TV.

Okay, with that out of the way, let's enter the Wine Making Facilities at Waverly Place Vineries

and Wineyards.

Making wine is incredibly easy. Making wine from a kit is even easier. They give you all the ingredients you need to make a damn fine wine.

It is because of this ease that I think kit wines entered in the Fair's Wine Competition should be judged separately from wines made from scratch. With scratch Wines, you have to select the grape, or fruit if you go that way, mash it, add sugars, add sterilizers, add nutrients.

With kit wines, you open the box, pour in the juice, top it off with water, wait a few weeks, bottle it and drink it.

Such was the case with our wine tonight. We were done with the opening procedures in about half an hour. Now we have to wait a week and then transfer it into a clean fermenter. After another couple of weeks, we will again rack it into a clean fermenter, add some chemicals to aid the clearing process and let it age a few more weeks. Then we bottle andage until we crack it open on Saturday, June 20th, which is by coincidence, the day of our Solstice Party.

Pictured to the left is the Must, which is what we Vintners call the unfermented wine. It think it is called that because at this point, you Must not drink it.

It's really sweet. It tastes like grape juice. What a surprise, huh!

This will be a white wine, but right now it has that cloudy look due to chemical nutrients that we added. We also added some pencil shaving that came in the kit. They're not really pencil shavings but that what it looks like. It's meant to add a smoky, oaky flavor to the wine.

I'll update this in a week when we move on to Step number Two in the instructions.

Oh, by the way, I got a nice sport shirt for Day Number Three of my Birthday Week.