Bottling the wine

Wine is aged to give it more taste and general mouthfeel as well as colour and other properties. Rushing the winemaking process is widely considered a waste of good wine among homebrewers of wine and is highly frowned upon.

Here is a little cheat sheet I found to predict how different ageing times affect the wine in the bottle.

Wine Aging	Properties
1 month	The definite minimum time it takes before you can even taste your wine, anything shorter results in bad tasting wine
3 months	Wine has matured more and gained increasing flavours and distinctions
6 months	The typical time for ageing wine, both red and white. Here your wine has a great taste and doesn't really need any longer maturing
10+ months	Matures the flavour of your wine even further. Can create more bitter, unique flavours. The longer you age, the more unique

Ireland not suitable for growing grapes - bah humbug!

Vineyard in Galicia, Spain
Photo (c) Alex Blackwell

I just stumbled across this article from 2016 in the AcademicWino titled. The Feasibility of Ireland Becoming a Wine Producing Country Due To Climate Change. The author concludes that it is unlikely yet doesn't even research the fact that Ireland already had two vineyards producing wines at the time. So bloody not believable. He thinks everything is wrong: wrong soil, wrong GDD, wrong temperature, wrong rainfall, no talent. Bah humbug. Come see our vines thriving and grapes ripening. Then speak. 

In fact, 17 years ago David Llewelyn started making wines in Ireland as a hobby. Now its a proper business and his Lusca wine sells for €65 a bottle. It's a novelty featured in the prestigious Celtic Whiskey shop in Dublin. We already have orders from our local wine bars who would love to feature a local wine. We laughed and said we'd come back in a few years. 

We are still waiting for our first wine to clarify before bottling but it's soon time to put this year's vintage to rest for a while. More later. 

Abysmal Autumn weather

a few leaves still hanging on

The past week has been abysmal weatherwise. We had Hurricane Epsilon on Thursday, Storm Aidan on Saturday, an unnamed low today and another tomorrow. We've had torrential rain, thunder and lightning -- something I've never experienced in Ireland, hail, sleet and wind, lots of wind. The buy off the coast here, M6, recorded a 30-metre (90f)t wave and the surfers were out having a blast. 

We had 227.9 mm rain in October, that's 67 mm more than last year in the same period. All the other variables were pretty average for the month. 

We've picked the apples but waited to pick the remaining pears which were beautiful this year, but they were all gone. Alex thinks the crows stole them. I just don't know. The berries are almost done now, just a few raspberries and strawberries left, mostly rotting in the wet weather or getting freeze-dried by the wind. 

The wine is clarifying. We will soon bottle the two or three bottles and wait for the requisite time period to sample. With our second lockdown underway and unable to travel more than 5 km from home, we're keeping ourselves busy. 

What a year! The American elections are tomorrow, and we voted long ago by email and mail ballot as we are both dual citizens. We can always be hopeful. 

We've been picking the remaining grapes to eat...very tasty

 

Pinot noir on the left
Albarino on the right

Three-year-old vines up the hill

The calm between the storms

So beautiful, but no blue moon

Peachy sunset