The Winter that Never Ends

Winter of 2018-2019 started early, with cold temps and 3 separate snowfalls before Thanksgiving. And it has not let up. Snowpocalypse 2019 left us with 17" and we have subsequently had at least a couple more snow events, with more in the forecast for this week.

So we're stuck inside, cooking and winemaking. 

Every so often at band practice on Thursday nights, we have dinner. Two weeks ago we had a dinner worth publishing. Chukar is a type of partridge. Josh and others shot these, and I thought they made a fine supper with cabbage casserole.

We have an abundance of crappie and made some killer fish tacos.

Today I worked on the wine. Traminette and Chardonel are both going to be at least decent and drinkable after cold stabilization. Both are slow to clear so I've treated both with SuperKleer. They're clearing already and we'll rack these next weekend. 

The results of cold stabilization.

The grenache rosé looks and tastes great. I racked one gallon off its tartaric acid crystals and bottled it. We'll sample this over the next few weeks and if it tastes fine, bottle the rest. I have 8 gallons of grenache rosé.

The Frontenac rosé unfortunately got a little bit oxidized. It doesn't taste bad, but the color is off. In retrospect, I brought this pH up too high; even though it got the standard dose of KMS every 3 months, the SO2 got too low. Lesson learned. I'm trying the milk trick, followed by Polyclar. I will only post pics if it works.

The other wine with color I don't like is guava/SB. I'm calling this "Psidium sauvignon." This wine has always had an unappealing color and the previous batches suffered the same way. I don't think it is oxidized, that's just the color you get from strawberry guava. I'm trying Polyclar to see if I can brighten it up. 

2018 OVZ went into the barrel. This wine got half of the oak cubes as compared to the 2017 OVZ, but after tasting, I think it's perfect. The 2017 OVZ has too much vanilla/cocoa flavor, but I expect it will settle down. The 2018 may actually be drinkable earlier.

The 2018 SB is bottle-able, but I ran out of energy and I had to cook this week's lunch.

This week's lunch is unintentionally paleo - Spaghetti Squash Meatball Casserole. Meatballs, greens, spinach, squash, tomatoes, and ricotta, topped with sauce and mozzarella.   

2017 Wines - Chapter 9 - Guava

I have a love-hate relationship with this fruit when it comes to wine. The first batch of wine I ever made was guava and purely by accident it was delightful. Then a couple of years ago I made a strawberry guava wine which I cold-soaked. Though the color is nice, too much time on the seeds left it bitter. I've been saving guava for a couple of years now, ready to try again. I'm pretentiously calling this one Psidium Sauvignon. Ingredients:

• 18.5# guava, mostly strawberry, some lemon and purple
• 46oz Sauvignon Blanc concentrate
• 1720g sugar
• 8.5 quarts water
• 6t pectic enzyme
• 0.5g Lallzyme EX
• 1t Fermaid K step fed
• 1t GoFerm
• 10g citric acid
• 10g tartaric acid
• 5g bentonite in primary
• 6g Opti White
• 3g Booster Blanc

I simmered the guava and assembled the wine. This was my first chance to use the new temperature control system. QA 23 was the yeast, and the lower limit was 15C/59F so I set it there and off she went.

The temp was very steady around 15C/59F. It oscillated a little bit but I tweaked some setting and by the end it was very stable. It didn't slow the ferment very much however and it still ripped through in about 7 days.

Wine Temp Control System: Update 1

I kicked off guava wine this weekend and it gave me an opportunity to test the Arduino temperature control system Adam and I built.

I acknowledge this is completely over-engineered. Let us have our fun, OK?

I secured the pump under the spigot.

I ran the thermometer through the hole in the lid and directly into the wine.

And this is probably the cause of my temperature fluctuations. I'm set at 15c/59F, the lower tolerance of my qa23 yeast. The Fi hangs around too long and overdrives the Fp, all of which means it continues to heat for a little while when it should have switched back to cooling.

The fluctuations seem to be getting smaller so I'm going to let it ride and see.

Drinking White Wine in the Sun

For the second time in a month, the Pierces are together for the holiday.  This time we headed south.  Marathon, Florida is much nicer than Fulton in the winter.

Monday we tried some snorkeling, and it was quite nice.  Captain Kevin Johnsen put us on several good reefs.  Highlights included moray eel, rays, sharks, barracuda, lobster, and countless different types of reef fish.

 Chili-lime fresh shrimp and rum-soaked grilled pineapple with a citrus rum sauce made a great dinner early in the week.

  Captain Kevin took the boys out again a second time later in the week.  Just for posterity: Snapper (Lane, Yellowtail, Mangrove, Mutton, Schoolmaster), Ladyfish, Nassau Grouper, Blue Striped Grunt, Cero Mackerel, Porgy, and a shark.

We ended up with 5-6 pounds of fish.  It made for a somewhat unconventional Christmas Eve dinner of fish tacos.

 This is, in part, a wine blog.  Thanks to Joy, we celebrated with a bottle of Schnebly Guava wine.   Schnebly is perhaps the most well-known of the tropical fruit wine producers.  We were very impressed with this wine.  It's a lovely rose color, not too sweet, and surprising strawberry element.  We'll be having this one again.

Happy Holidays, everyone!