Peeking into the rock

Last year's wine was made from slightly underripe plums and it will have to age for a couple-few years before it can really be drunk.

This year's wine is two very small batches because I picked a bucket of plums and let it sit for a couple of days before I picked the other bucket and I meant to process them together -- but the first bucket had decided to go ahead and start fermenting with wild yeasts and it tasted pretty good for that particular stage (that is to say, it did not taste good in the sense that you would actually drink it, it just tasted promising). So I have them in separate primary fermenters (foodgrade plastic buckets), with montrachet yeast in the other bucket. If the wild bucket stops fermenting, I can either buy another packet of yeast or combine the two buckets, depending on what seems right at the time. At the moment I wouldn't combine them as they taste quite different (both pretty good). The montrachet bucket has a lighter, oranger color, and the wild bucket has a deeper, more maroon color. They taste and smell different, but they both taste very sweet and full at this stage (where not much alcohol has developed).

I bought a hydrometer -- I don't know why I didn't before, it was only six dollars! I thought they were more like thirty, so I was dragging my feet. The way it works is that you measure the specific gravity before you start, and then when you finish, and by doing some easy math, you calculate the alcohol by volume. Otherwise, you don't know how strong your wine is without a laboratory.

Speaking of which, yesterday I opened a bottle of my 2007 "good effort" wine. That's the wine we took to River Run the last summer the nice fellow was alive and the winemaker said it was a good effort, which pleased me as being real praise from a winemaker -- not the elaborate praise you might shower on a person who you have no expectations for. Anyway, I thought it might have gone off because I didn';t store it well, but it was actually a bit better than I remembered, which is a point in the school of thought that says plum wine needs a lot of aging in general (I have seen opposing opinions online: I am now firmly in the pro-aging school). And it was pretty strong, too. We drank little sips, but I drank a few little sips, enough to account for a small glassful, and I was totally useless the rest of the day. I don't drink much, obviously, and I have always been a bit of a lightweight, but not to the point of going to bead at three in the afternoon and not really getting up till morning. Not having measured the specific gravity of that wine when it was on the must, I can't tell you how strong it really is, but it tastes like brandy.

And that leads me to another point. I have long wanted to make brandy. Ted had made a still at one point, but I don't know what happened to the pieces of it and I would be a bit scared of it now as the chamber was one of those bulbous glass laboratory vells. The Chinese and the Italians both make small pot stills (stainless steel and copper respectively) for less than two hundred dollars, but considering I'd make at the maximum a quart of brandy a year, this is definitely not a cost-cutting measure. So I don't know. Making one myself from odds and ends the way that people on the homebrew forums do looks equally expensive, especially since it entails welding!

edit: this year's plums are a bit overripe. I think that's a good thing in a plum wine.

Finally, apparently rhubarb wine is a thing. And apparently a potentially good thing, though you have to deal with excess acidity (not difficult, you use chalk). This is an interesting proposition to me because I have an ambitious little rhubarb patch which would like to remind us that the Triffids also were plants and were capable of taking over the world in a day or two. "Not that we're threatening you all, or anything," they say. "But look at our magnificent leaves, are they not big enough to clothe small children? And our mighty green stalks! We laugh at your cutting knife! We will have more and more of our shining green cohort every day!"

Yes, they are green, not red. Because I knew nothing nothing about rhubarb when I planted it for the nice fellow. If you care aboujt the color of your rhubarb, do your research and get a variety that is the color you are after, is all I can say about that.

I made another batch of peach leather, this time not as a side project to canning peaches. Yield: one big mesh orange bag of windfalls makes five trays of peach leather. Remember to line the trays with the drying mesh and the parchment. The mesh orange bag is for selling ten pounds of oranges, but peaches are much denser than oranges because of their respective peels. Connie still has too many peaches and I don't know if she wants me to make them into things. She could do peach wine, I suppose. I'm not going to. Anyway, lots and lots of them are windfalls, only really good for leather and sauce and stuff.

I racked the wine on Monday. This was eight days after putting it in secondary. It tasted, Frank said, "like Smirnoff ice." That is, it was sweet sweet, and kind of harsh tasting, but probably not very alcoholic. It was a raspberry-magenta color, and less murky than before, because it had left a pink smear on the bottom of the carboy (and the extra-wine jug, which is also fitted with an airlock and so therefore is getting almost the same experience as the carboy), but it is still opaque. I guess it must have some translucency because it looks less murky than before. It's rapidly fizzing yet. The nice lady at "Portable Potables" says we should let it get as alcoholic as we want it to be, and then kill the yeast with Campden tablets and adjust the sweetness. I like sweet wines more than I used to, but we'll see.

Emma's Jason's mother has too many Asian pears and I don't like the recipes for them I find online, but they make nice tasting juice. My too many apples are still coming online. I still havde some thinking to do. I think I may take Robyn's too many Asian pears and my too many apples and, surprise, make wine of them. Since I won't make cider. I do have another carboy so I can handle another five gallons of juice.

There are too many grapes coming along but not enough, and not consistently enough, to manage anything spectacular. I'm thinking odd bunches of raisins, maybe. No, I can't just eat them. There are too many. We will also have too manypomegranates this year and I really don't know. The pomegranate liqueur was good but we just aren't big liqueur drinkers.

Those are my fruit progress notes for September 5, 2007.

Also: I have pruned the plum tree way down. I have done almost half the work of pruning the apricot tree way down, including removing the stump of the diseased branch. I have initiated work on the apple tree, thinking that I'd really like to borrow a guy with a chainsaw because I have to remove some large stuff. The almond trees are going to be a big deal again. I'm planning a big attack on the pomegranate after the fruit is done, but I can do all that myself because the pomegranate is all small limbs except for a couple which are close to the ground. I need a new limb saw: Ted says the old one is too dull, and I don't think we can afford to have it sharpened (they have complicated teeth). Also the grape needs severe discipline, and a real arbor, not the haywired one of plastic piping and twine. I also pruned both lemons.

And the lemons need feeding.

I was thinking that what's going on with my trees is plum pox.  There is only one treatment: eradication.  Which means sanitary removal of the trees as soon as the plum is stripped.  But according to everything I've read there is no plum pox in California and nobody expects it any time soon.

Then what I thought was that what both the apricot and the plum have is xylella fastidiosa, which is a bacterium spread by the glassy-winged sharpshooter, which is sort of like a leafhopper and sort of like an aphid. The disease is "phony peach disease" -- I don't know why "phony," except that maybe some people use phony to mean unacceptable or puny, not just to mean fake.  But that's not a real likely thing either.

There is brown rot on the plum, but that's different.  For one thing, it's treatable!  For another, it really does appear to be a second problem.

Or more: I think I may have a virus, and more than one fungus going on.  We have a choice of turning the back yard into a surgery or removing the trees to begin with.

Currently, though, I think I'm going for trying to cure the trees.

On a related front, I've been working on getting the primary fermentation going all day.  Seriously, I didn't even get dressed.  But I did make a straining bag, teeny tiny stitches by hand because I was annoyed by the sewing machine.  It fits perfectly inside the bucket!  And I treated the plums very carefully with campden tablets and cut the weird looking parts off them.  The bucket is going under the apple tree, carefully shielded from bugs and detritus and direct light, so I can tend it without being enclosed in the fumes!

Oh, and there's endage in sight for the nerdy gay romantic comedy.   Really, this time.  I've got notes and everything.

The nice fellow turned off the water to work on the loud noise the pipes make when the toilet is flushed (I don't say "hammering" because it doesn't fit the description the do it yourself people use for that syndrome). But he didn't manage to fix the problem and the water stayed off.

What water had he laid by?

Well, there was a bucket of used bath water I had set aside to flush the toilet with because if you flush with the bucket there is no noise. There were two half-liters of water in the drinking pitchers. And there are about four gallons of water set aside in plastic containers with a drop of bleach, for disasters (we should have much more).

Emma and Keith (who is going to law school in two weeks! I get my couch back!) went to the corner store and brought back four gallons of bottled water.

Real-time blogging: I just told MC there is no water for baths or laundry. He's been here kind of too much, but I have to give him a little slack as he is actively pursuing jobs that might in aggregate end him up with enough money to get a room somewhere and get him out of my bathtub for good.

My current theory about the lightheadedness is that it will go away when I get my new glasses which ought to be here Real Soon Now. The eye guy said that he wanted to put a prism on one lens because the muscle imbalance between my eyes has increased markedly. I have noticed some eye strain, but I only realized that's what it was when the eye guy talked about it.

The Healthnet haelth coach lady looked up the alcohol phenomenon and it looks like, yes, mere fumes from wine can interact with the gabapentin to cause the effects I have noticed. I think I have to make other plans for the plum tree, then, because when I make wine, I am exposed to alcohol fumes in a much greater concentration than I experienced on Saturday at the wine bar. Oh, didn't I tell that story? Saturday was the quarterly Passport Day for the Santa Cruz wine region. Wineries open up to the public and have tastings of things they don't usually do. The nice fellow loves this, and goes every time, and usually brings home something nice from River Run, which has become our very most favorite winery of all. Saturday I was kind of wrecked and didn't go on the primary run, but I did walk with him over to Beauregard on the wharf. I didn't drink any wine, because of the one-sip incident a few months ago, but I did smell it, and a couple of them I put my tongue to the surface of. Nevertheless, when we left the place, I felt drunk and I swayed when I walked and I knocked a wine glass off a table.

Oh well, it's an imperfect life.

I've got half an hour to finish my quota for the day.

I have no idea how you access this from here, but I did put up some pictures.  The point was that I wanted to show off the label for the 2003 wine which I finally bottled today and not a moment too soon as I am a week almost behind in racking and sending this year's wine to the secondary but I got a little bit incolved and threw in some other labels I made and a picture of a couple of pipers with cold hands and the sun in their eyes.

So it turns out that I really do need new glasses.  And it turns out that double-sided poster tape doesn't really stick photo paper labels to wine bottles very well.  And that I can spend a good half hour scrubbing a dozen bottles with dish detergent, Method, bleach, baking soda, and egg shells, and still not get all the adhesive off the outsides or all the sediments off the insides.  (actually, fourteen bottles)

 

The nice fellow says I should probably already be calling it vinegar, but it's not.  Really, it's quite drinkable.  Or at least cookable-with.  As I will prove over the next few months.

It has taken me another week to not quite finish chapter 16, most of which time I have spent not writing because of pain and hassle.  But I did nearly finish the chapter today.  Our guy is busily getting thrown out of Forager Girl's apartment, and the next Wish is about to happen: Winston's going to wish he could afford an apartment of his own rather than live with such spoilsports as his roommates who don't want him to bring home homeless losers on a repeat basis.   And then: chapter 17!  Who the heck knows!  I've got to get my guy to lose the money he has in his pocket before Chapter 18, and I have an idea for how to have it happen, but I'm worried about it.  I actually like Oakland, and I don't want to add to the disrespect the city gets.

This is the first time I have used the rich text mode and I'm noticing all these squirrely little buttons.  I know what most of them are, but they make me feel lightheaded.

I think I could use the add-image if I knew what the URL of the fotobilder gallery is.

Okay. I have almost 10 gallons of plum must in primary fermentation. Translation: I have squished nearly 20 gallons of plums into broken, wet masses, and compacted them almost to 10 gallons, and I have set them to fermenting in big plastic buckets bought from restaurants for a dollar, with nutrients and yeast and sugar, and now my kitchen is full of vinegar flies. Along about now a day or two from now the kitchen will begin to smell of raw alcohol and decaying fruit. Just in time for the young man to return from New York.

I have three gallons of wine from last year in its last settling, with bentonite clay to draw off the sediment. Next weekend I bottle. Fifteen bottles, maybe? At least a dozen. Next year, more like two dozen.

I lost a couple of gallons of apple juice due to the Breaking Glass Syndrome -- if there's something glass in my house it will be broken. This time it wasn't by me, but I gloat not. Anyway, the apple tree will be full of huge ripe apples again in a couple of weeks, so we'll do the hard cider thing then.

I have dried six pounds of plums into a quart of yummy purple sweet-tart chip things. I am now doing the same thing with apples. Come Christmas, I will make fruitcakes with the dried fruit in them.

Yesterday we found out that we're not fond of Nagasaki-style saraudon, and that I am still inordinately fond of miso soup with soba (buckwheat noodles). Tonight I have tiny onions which I am going to cook very slowly in oil until they are tiny globes of goodness and then we will put them on to baked potatoes. And we will have long beans and we will have beast.

And then -- well, I'm dragging the kid to the practice competition even though she wants to go to bed at 8:30 -- she'll get in bed by 9:15, anyway. But she has to do something to prepare for the real competition Friday. Which is when Frank gets home, at the same time as she has to compete, so Ted will pick him up while Emma and I deal with Pleasanton.

The kids sounded very good when they debuted their new march tune for the band mommies Saturday night, especially considering they'd only been working on it for a few days and didn't know it very well.

Oh, and I wrote 52 words today.

"Some days are diamond, some days are stone . . ."

So I took Emma to the Monterey Scottish Games so she could see what a bagpipe competition is like. It's nothing like I would have thought. No audience: just the judge. You walk around in this little square area that's marked off with streamers, and you play your piece, while the judge reads your music and listens to you, and makes notes on your playing. Later on you find out what you got. Emma thought it would be asier than doing it for an audience, which surprised me because I think she's used to doing audience work.

The Grade IV pipers were about all in the same ballpark with Emma, so that was reassuring. Some of Jay's students were there, and we were looking out for them, but the only one we were sure of was Paul who did a very creditable ground and first variation of "Too Long in This Condition." Emma was pleased -- she knows the whole thing.

So there were all these SCA types walking around with full regalia and little daggers in their socks. Really. Emma would kind of like one of them, but when we looked at them they were pretty fancy and expensive and the littlest ones didn't seem to have functional blades (she'd be using it to trim her reeds and stuff, not to pick fights). We looked at sporrans too: the nice ones cost three hundred and more. There were sporrans made from whole badgers, and one of the musicians in the group Wicked Tinkers had one made of a bear paw, apparently. That seems ghoulish to me. The ones Emma liked were made like very fine shoes -- naturally she also liked the nicest ghillie brogues, but we didn't even see any of those for sale, so we didn't have to get sticker shock on them. We spent money anyways. She got a tartan sash, some small silver jewelry, and I got a CD of Wicked Tinkers and a pipe band compilation -- most of the piping CDs didn't even list the tunes by name! All they said was "strathspey, reel, march" or "Selection." Selection? What does that mean?

And there were stage mommies with their little Highland Fling dancing girls. It's funny watching the rigid, stereotyped recitals these have become, when you know that the dance was at one time a drunken revelry danced with great abandon and much shouting. Notice I don't say "the right way" or "really" or "authentic" anywhere in there. This thing we saw was real too, but different. And it's just -- just odd.

I've been thinking about meconnaissance since I read the article in Anthropology Today about the kamikaze pilots. The Monterey Games was just chockablock with it. ALl these different people talking about the same thing and meaning entirely different things by it. No thing that was there seemed to have the same meaning for more than three people at the same time. I'm surprised they can even get this thing going. WHy don't they bog down in a miasma of misunderstanding? For that matter, how can any group function, when there are so many different ways to understand each thing?

Other things in today's subject: we walked over to watch the Mime Troupe and for Emma to help dismantle the works afterwards. On the way home I discovered that Logos was having a sale on used cookbooks . . . so I bought seven. I don't usually do this. But the one I wanted, Elizabeth David's A Book of Middle Eastern Food, which I used to own but it fell apart into usuable little atoms,was not there. I found a less satisfactory book of hers which I got and two Paula Wofert books I didn't get. It's probably unreasonable but Wolfert's books annoy me. They're pretentious and largely unusable -- she uses too many rare ingredients and unreproduceable methods, and insists that the reader will never know what the dish is supposed to taste like anyway because they didn't get to eat it the way she did, in some place that she can't even tell us where it is. I mean! That's not a cookbook, it's a put-down. Anyway, there were a bunch of those little spiral-bound Time-Life "cooking of - - -" dealies for a dollar each and I got them. They're nice little books. And I think I got a Spanish cookbook and a Mediterranean vegetable book. Well. I do eat Mediterranean vegetables kind of a lot.

Maybe I am a Mediterranean vegetable.

I have to apply for a job tomorrow morning. There's a pretty decent chance I can get it. I don't want to jinx it, but it would be being a literacy coach for k-2 grades at a nice little school . . . on the other side of Watsonville. I better carpool for self-preservation again, if I can.

And I have to clear out this room -- which is the second-nastiest room in the house -- because we're geting a trio of lateral files tomorrow to build a new desk with. I stained and defted a 29" by 96" piece of fine oak plywood this morning, to be our new desk top.

Then this will be just about the best room in the house.

Oh, and I wrote a little over a thousand words today (and I don't feel bad about it being less than my peak, considering all the work I did in other areas of life -- I also racked the wine, which is weird: one batch is orange colored! -- but it seems like it will taste pretty good after I have sufficiently clarified and aged it). A funny thing happened: I came to a natural place to break the chapter, just a little shorter than they have been, and the work I had thought would happen, didn't: instead of the whole invasion by the other watchers happening, I got to this cliffhanger with the watchers just showing up and my guy's instinct kicking in and telling him to be afraid of them.

I'm pretty happy with the chapter -- unexpected things happened in it. My guy tries to manipulate the bad guys into a falling-out, but it doesn't work. Some maneuvering around breakfast and stuff.

I don't know if I'll get any writing done tomorrow, but if I do, I'll be starting with the invasion of the other watchers, and continuing with my guy's escape, and ending up with my guy's flight on the road. In order for it to be the right size for the rhythm of the chapters, that last bit will have to be a whole incident. Will he end up in the East Bay? Maybe.