Relatitude

Monday, August 21, 2017

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Lisa's New Hobby

I've been bothering Lisa to get a hobby. I've even offered to share one of mine. Joking, I suggested woodworking so that we could rebuild the arbor. She took me seriously.

The first arbor we built out by the pool was made of cedar and had tall, stately semicircular arches put together with biscuits. The arches themselves held up reasonably well, but there were two design flaws. First, there was not enough stability built into the span. I soon found myself going out in the spring and adding a metal brace here and there to keep the top together in the north-south direction. Second, it was made from cedar, which had a nice finish and was easy to work, but which didn't hold up well at the top of each post. A couple of years ago we took the whole thing down.

This new arbor was simplified and we knocked it out weekend before last. We have 2x8 across the span, 2x6 parallel to the walk, and 4" lag screws to hold everything in place. It wants to rack just a little in the east-west direction so we'll be adding some 45° braces. Overall however it's very sturdy. We are still debating whether it gets a coat of opaque white stain after it dries out.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

Cooling Off (the wine, silly)

I've been thinking about ways to keep my white wine fermentations cool and slow. So far my solution has been to put the fermentation bucket in a tub, fill the tub with water, and drop ice packs in the water to keep it cool. The temps (and resulting wine) have been variable.

A thread by Sean on the WMT wine forum prompted me to get moving on this. I will need the help of my engineer son Adam. We started spec'ing it out today. We'll use a different model than Sean did. He pumped the wine itself through the cooler. I plan on only pumping the tub water through the cooler, using the water as a coolant.

I'm trying hard to contribute. I had never heard of peltier coolers, but after doing some research I found one on Amazon that seems to meet Adam's requirements. In response Adam texted,

"I checked out the specs on that TEC, it's max current is 15A but it has the various DT curves down to 3A. If we design the control loop right I bet we can get away with a 3-6A current."

Right.

Anyway, we're tentatively planning to use an Arduino unit as the controller. I'd never heard of that either until today. Stay tuned.

In the meantime today we smoked some salmon for dinner.

Too Hot to Move

The dragon fruit has started to ripen. Friday we celebrated with Dragon Fruit martinis.

Then we sampled our first bottle of Chambourcin with gouda and mushroom cheeseburgers. We're happy with this wine - it is smooth, earthy, and went well with the cheeseburgers.

Saturday was too hot to work outside. I spent most of the day making and applying wine labels. The heat gun for the PVC shrink wraps works like a charm, so long as it is not too close. We cooked with Pinot Grigio. Lisa likes this wine a lot, but to me, while it is very drinkable, something is just a little "off."

We made a phyllo tomato tart, which while very tasty, was a little difficult to handle because the layers of phyllo didn't stick together that well.

We finished the bottle of Chambourcin with steaks which were delicious. Too much red meat for one week perhaps, but worth it. The leftover phyllo was combined with fresh blackberry cream cheese filling to make turnovers.

Two inches of rain overnight made all of the watering yesterday somewhat pointless. On the plus side, we have cooler temps on Sunday and the rain barrels are replenished. We're picking the last of the summer fruit, and then we can start thinking about the 2017 wines.

Sunday, July 2, 2017

Inventory

No 2017 winemaking just yet, but we are getting close. Blueberries are in, and between what we have picked at Danamay Farms and a little left over from last year, we've got over 40#. That should be enough to press for a rosé and still get a 3 gallon batch of traditional blueberry.

Blackberries are also coming in, both behind the chicken coop here at home and at Danamay Farms. We are behind on blackberry picking, we have maybe only 25#. I'm aiming for 40# or so for a straight juice blackberry. Hopefully it will come out like the 2016, not the flawed vintage of 2015. We cracked open a 2016 Blackberry for dinner glazed peach and honey chicken this past week and it was delicious.

The grapes are coming along. I understood Norton was a vigorous grower, but so far it is lagging behind the other grapes for me. Traminette is my best grower, followed closely by just about every other variety I planted, save Chambourcin and Norton.

Traminette foreground, Chardonel in the back

Vidal Blanc

In other fruit news, the pawpaws are coming right along. I found this oddball in the mix, a conjoined pawpaw.

Today we'll finish up mowing and bottle some 2016 wine. The rest of the blackberry needs to be bottled, along with the Pinot Grigio, elderberry rosé, and blueberry. My nose tells me we knocked it out of the park with our passion fruit wine, and it needs to be racked, along a few others. But there are empty carboys calling.

Sunday, June 4, 2017

Amaretto is the Bacon of Alcohol

Every so often we have a Friday office Happy Hour. This time we held it at our house and Brice supplied the line of the evening. It was not from his T-shirt which asked, "WTF Where's The Fish?"

We wound up going through 5 bottles of home brew, and here they are, in order of consumption (and inebriation).

2015 Elderberry Blackberry Rosé was the starter, chosen because it is pretty reliable. But it was strangely too heavy for a warm evening on the back porch. Can a wine have too much body? At the end of the evening the bottle was empty.

2015 Lychee is as popular as ever. Well balanced, semi-dry, plenty of lychee aroma and flavor. Jamie wants a bottle for her birthday. My parents friends have requested 3 cases. Before bottling this wine, I absolutely agonized over the acid adjustments. It would seem that it was worth it.

2016 Blend 1 was just bottled last weekend. It is 50% Syrah, 50% elderberry and I'm very happy with this result. The Syrah (from grapes) came out smooth and uber-fruity but too thin and light. The elderberry brings the color back. The taste is just what you would expect from this blend, equal amounts of elderberry and fruity Syrah. I need a clever name for this blend.

Bottled wine from last weekend

2016 Blend 2 was also just bottled. 70% Syrah, 15% elderberry, 15% blackberry. Elderberry contributes some color and just a little background earthiness to contrast the fruitiness of the other flavors. I hit this with a little extra KMS before bottling because the Syrah underwent MLF and the blackberry has all of that malic acid. So far so good. Another empty bottle at Happy Hour.

Finally someone went into the cellar and came back with 2015 Blueberry. I am not fond of this wine. It is made with red grape concentrate, and I simply can't get past the Concord. Saturday morning, even after the second rinse of the bottle, I could still smell the Concord grape. Naturally everyone loved it.

Sunday, May 28, 2017

Spring Collection of Pictures

I have been collecting a few pics of some interesting garden, greenhouse, and kitchen things, and so while I have nothing particularly interesting to write about, a post is in order.

Earlier this month we spread 45 cubic yards of mulch. Tom lent a skid loader which made all the difference.