Restful Weekends

The harvest is over. I have fruit in the freezer for a few more wines - passion fruit, acerola, pawpaw, jaboticaba - but these will be small, mostly one gallon batches. We're going to let it cool off a bit more before kicking those wines off.

The Foch and Frontenac are holding their color so far and tasting very good if not almost a little bit too fruit forward. I was concerned about the acid, but the malolactic finished in record time and the pH readings look decent at 3.57-3.60. They've received their KMS doses with 100% adjustments. I have two 5-gallon barrels on the way for aging this wine. Hopefully this will concentrate them and add some complexity.

There is significant amount of crown gall in the vineyard, affecting mainly the Chambourcin and particularly the Norton. I'm seriously considering removing all but 1/2 row of Norton and replanting Arandell and Petite Pearl. The Missouri State Grape has proven very disappointing.

We didn't aggressively pursue the pawpaws this year, instead leaving some for the critters. But Garry texted me looking for some ingredients for specials, and we sent him some pawpaws, lemongrass, and guava. We could not resist going to Bek's to see what Danny did with them, and we were not disappointed.

Pork chop and apple fritter with pawpaw rum sauce

Wahoo with lemongrass and guava gastrique

And we'll leave you with this guy, who's been hanging around the yard for a few weeks. I wonder if he isn't responsible for some of the grape losses, he looks pretty fat and happy.

Starting Over with Vegetables

My original plan for the greenhouse was to grow summer vegetables in the winter. Fresh salsa in February. I did that, barely. One year, with lots of effort, I managed a couple of tomatoes and some cilantro. I can't recall if I grew the lime in the greenhouse; I'm pretty sure I cheated on the onions. But it was salsa and it was February and we ate it.
With that mission accomplished, I gave up on tomatoes in the greenhouse. They don't grow that well in the cold, they require extra light, and they're whitefly magnets. For many years, the greenhouse has been dedicated to tropical plants, mainly tropical fruits. But this year we decided to we decided to clear some space and try some vegetables again.  Saturday we cleared that space.

Jasmine 'Belle of India'

Stephanotis floribunda

The greenhouse has a terrific smell in the mornings these days. It could be the Stephanotis floribunda, which has long outgrown it's little trellis but which I can't quite bear to pull down off of the fan conduit.  More likely the fragrance is Jasmine 'Belle of India'. It is nice enough out there that we can tolerate the noise from the obnoxious cows outside. I am close to taking action on the cattle.

There are a number of things in the greenhouse producing small numbers of blooms and fruit. One orchid is complete confused about bloom times.

'Kari' has rebounded very nicely and it looks like we'll continue to get Carambola wine for the foreseeable future.

We have our best crop of Miracle Fruit (Synsepalum dulcificum) yet. What kind of sick person considers making Miracle Fruit wine?

My goal has for years been one new fruit per year. For the second year in a row, we have met that goal. Last year was a feast of new fruit. This year's entry is the Phalsa Berry, Grewia asiatica. The fruit is also known as Sherbet Berry. It is an odd little fruit, about the size of a blueberry, purple in color, but with a stippled, almost hairy skin and a texture that is a little mealy. It grows a little too well in the greenhouse and will need to be pruned back pretty hard this fall.

Triphasia trifolia is a citrus relative which makes a fuit known as a limeberry. I have a few of these in the freezer, and I intent to use them in my "Varieta tropica" wine along with the Phalsa Berry and other odds and ends. This plant, along with Psidium myrtoides, adamantly refuses to become a tree, preferring instead to drape its prickly branches out and down below the pot and onto the ground. Lisa undertook the challenging job of repotting both plants. She also tackled a couple of the Rollinias, the yellow jabotica (Myrciaria glomerata), and others, and they all came out great.

The lemongrass in the south end of the greenhouse has served as the source for many gallons of tasty lemongrass wine, but it was overgrown and unruly. I pulled out two stands of the lemongrass, cut them back severely, and replanted. This should make room for a small stand of veggies. The yield ended up being around 2 pounds of lemongrass, and I have no open carboys. So I offered it to my friend Rebekah and she accepted.  Hopefully Bek's can do something nice with the stuff, otherwise it was compost.

Future home of spinach and cilantro

We went to the store to be sure we bought some seeds before they put everything away for the season, then came home and had some cocktails. The best was the Sky Pilot, made with Arron's homemade Applejack moonshine.  Tasty!

Into the Secondary

The strawberry guava, lemongrass ginger, and passion fruit wines are now in the secondary and finishing up.  We're happy with the taste, smell, and color.

Newest wines in the secondary.

Guava and Lemongrass-Ginger Wines

We have two new, promising wines going on this New Year's Day.  My first-every wine was from guava, a blend of strawberry guava (Psidum littorale v. Longipes), lemon guava (Psidum littorale v. Littorale), and dwarf guava (Psidium guajava nana).  Although difficult to clear, it was wonderful wine.

Since then, the dwarf guava died, and the lemon guava tree was dug up and removed from the greenhouse.  The strawberry guava has continued happily on, leaving me with 23# of frozen fruit.  As before, we used a sketchy online recipe, only this time with about 60 other batches of  winemaking experience.  Per the recipe, and violating convention, we boiled the fruit, tweaking the fruit up to 5#/gallon.

Bagged fruit

We drip-drained the bagged fruit, added water to 3 gallons, added tannin, citric acid, and sugar.  Once cooled, we added pectic enzyme, followed by Booster Blanc; we want to preserve the fruit aromas and color as much as possible. Then it got covered with Saran Wrap and into the fridge for a 3 day cold soak.

Last night I pulled it out to warm up.  We nailed the pH at 3.31.  SG was a bit low at 1.081 so we added another 9 ounces of sugar.  Then we hit it with bentonite and a good starter of QA 23.

After cold soak, with the yeast starter on top.

Strawberry guava could turn out to be a very nice rose style wine.

At the same time we started Lemongrass-Ginger batch number three.  The lemongrass for all of my wines comes from a start given to me by my greenhouse friend and fellow Puerto Rico fruit hunter Jay Cotterman.  It grows like crazy in the greenhouse.  The original online recipe is pretty good, but not lemony enough for me.  With my last batch I doubled the lemongrass, which helped, but this was offset by some super-potent candied ginger.  The second batch, if carbonated, could pass for ginger ale.

Missouri-grown lemongrass

So this batch doubled the lemongrass again.  We're now up to 500g of lemongrass for a 3 gallon batch.  We dropped the fresh ginger, threw in a greenhouse Meyer lemon (juice and rind), and cut back the candied ginger to only 50g.  The grass was twice boiled, strained, bagged.

Lemongrass-ginger wine must

We nailed the SG at 1.089 and the pH was fine at 3.27.  We added pectic, tannin, and acid (citric and tartaric), and then a starter of K1-V1116.  Today, after 4 days, we're at 1.040.  I added the bentonite and the last of the nutrient.  It is pretty cold here, and the draft out of the crawl space is keeping this fermentation temp down nicely at 16.9C.  Good stuff.

We've got some additional wine planning to do today while watching football.  After seven tries, we've yet to make what I think is a really good batch of persimmon wine.  We have two bags left in the freezer from 2014.  Drawing inspiration from one Gary Weaver, we may try a small 1 gallon batch using boiled fruit, possibly with oak in the primary, using some of the remaining elderberries.  We've got more starfruit on the way, and the next batch of carambola will see some acid tweaks.  Finally, we're excited to try the QA 23 on a batch of passionfruit wine.  So much to do!