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

Earth is heating up

 

From Statista Infographics

NASA is monitoring all kinds of climate statistics. The latest data on temperature show that August of this year was 2.14C degrees higher than a selected average of measurements from the 1880s until now. Small wonder that California is burning. The epic scale of the wildfires is growing with the increase in temperature and this year reached a shocking new milestone -- one of the fires, The August Complex, on the border between San Francisco and Oregon has burned more than 1 million acres. The total acres burned this year so far is double any previous figure, at a staggering 4 million acres burnt. 

New York Times

New York Times

The second stage

We racked the wine into the demijohn and corked it with the oyster farm cork with fermentation airlock. It smelled very good and Alex said he tasted it yesterday and it was good. But the specific gravity was 1.02 so we have a little ways to go to get to 0.99. It might be just a little cool in the pantry area. It will remain there for about two weeks before stabilizing. 

There is not much more to this stage so we'll just wait and hope it continues to ferment a little more. Meanwhile, the remaining grapes, those that were way behind ripening, are not ready to pick and eat. 

Making the wine

Lovely morning but heavy rain due all afternoon

I've been reading up about how to make wine at home. Unfortunately, none of the descriptions covers our situation so we have had to punt. We mashed the grapes by hand and with a sterilized wooden meat tenderizer. That worked reasonably well. For ten days, the grapes have fermented. Alex stirred daily and the bubbling going through the fermentation airlock was at times scary and loud but very satisfying. 

I bought yeast and Campden tablets. But how to extract the liquid from the vat after the first fermentation? Alex decided my muslin bag for making apple jelly was just the thing. Well in no book have I seen this, but it's worth a try. We found a nice demijohn at Ross House and cleaned it up. It looked like it hadn't been used in 30 years. Full of dead bugs and spiders. But it cleaned up beautifully and I sterilized it with the stuff that came with the winemaking kit. 

Alex found some predrilled stoppers from his old oyster growing days and they happened to fit the demijohn and the airlocks perfectly. Stage 2 would be completed without additional expenditure. And as the final steps of stabilising the wine won't be necessary -- we're going to have maybe 2 bottles if we're lucky -- we should be bottling on about a week. I'll report the specific gravity in the next post after we've measured it. 

BTW, YouTube has loads of useful how-to videos:  https://youtu.be/n7tauROWh0Y  

California is burning again

Horrible fires in California have killed people and destroyed structures. At least 19 wineries have been destroyed or damaged by the Glass fire. As the fire made its way across wine country, about 70,000 people were evacuated. Vintners who’d fled the blaze returned to the area to discover in many cases that their life’s work had been destroyed. Here’s the latest on the winery and restaurant burning, businesses damaged or lost in the fire.

In some cases, the vines were charred but the buildings stood. In other cases, the buildings were destroyed with minimal damage to the vineyards. So unpredictable, yet so deja vu. People are leaving California never to return, after several years of repeated hell. Oregon and Washington states are ablaze as well, all this while America's cities are being destroyed by angry mobs. 

Bob and Jody Lipkin, owners of Lattitudes & Attitudes sailing magazine, for which we write often, lost everything. They left with their two cats and one van, leaving everything else behind as they evacuated with the fire cresting the hills around their home. Fortunately, they were insured. 

 #GlassFire: 51,266 acres, 2% contained.

#ZoggFire: 55,046 acres, 9% contained. #CreekFire: 307,051 acres, 44% contained. #BearFire/#NorthComplex: 314,949 acres, 79% contained. (#NorthComplexWestZone: 84,595 acres, 95% contained.) #BobcatFire: 114,438 acres, 63% contained.