The Seeds Have Been Ordered!

I ordered my seeds for the garden. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had a gift certificate to Thompson and Morgan, so many of the seeds came from there, but I also got some organic and heirloom seeds from Peaceful Valley, which is where I got my cover crops from. I also plan on getting potatos and onion sets from a local gardening store in a month or two. Lastly, I randomly picked up some Brussels Sprouts seeds that I saw at Lowe's because I didn't really like any of the Brussel Sprout options I had been looking at online and they were really cheap. So the final list is:

Lowe's:
- Ferry-Morse Catskills Brussels Sprouts

Thompson and Morgan:
- Organic Rocket/Arugula
- Pakman F1 Hybrid Broccoli
- Beet Swiss Chard Bright Lights
- Organic Bush Bean Modus
- Gourmet Sweet Pepper
- Spring Onion Perfomer
- Minnesota Midget Melon
- Spacemaker Cucumber

Peaceful Valley:
- Old German Heirloom Tomato
- Isis Candy Cherry Tomato
- Cocozelle Heirloom Zucchini
- Kohlrabi
- Spaghetti Squash
- Seeds of Change Snow Peas
- Pak Choi (aka Bak Choy)

Local Garden Store (future purchase):
- Long day bulbing storage onion sets
- One or two varieties of potatoes

The wine is bottled!

Yup, I finally got to the point of bottling the Seyval. It spent about a week in the garage in the secondary fermenter for the cold stabilization. There was some stuff at the bottom of the fermenter at the end, but it looked more like sediment than crystalized precipitate like I was expecting. Either way, its good that it was at the bottom and not mixed up in the wine.

I racked the wine off of the sediment before proceeding. While racking, I tried to put the wine through some filter paper that I bought at the wine making store when I picked up my juice in the fall. I don't know how those are intended to be used, but the wine did not want to go through the filter paper. The paper is about 8" diameter and I formed it into a cone and put it in a funnel. The wine was only coming out at about a drip per second or so. It must be intended to be used under pressure or something. In the past I've used coffee filters with mixed results, so I ran around looking for any coffee filters in the house. I didn't find any, though. Somehow this filtering step always turns out to be much more difficult than it should be. I ended up lining a semi-spherical pasta colinder with several sheets of the filter paper. About 95% of the wine just went in between the overlapped filter paper and not getting filtered at all, but I didn't see any better options at the time.

After the racking/filtering step, I bottled and corked the wine. That happened on 1/26, so it should be ready to try in March. I tried a few sips of the wine. I had it just after having a sip of another wine that Jaime was drinking. The acidity of my wine was rather shocking. Perhaps it was just the juxtaposition to the other wine, but it is a rather acidic wine, regardless. We shall see how it tastes after bottle conditioning.

Vina Teresita 2008 Merlot - 7.5

This wine review is for the 2008 Vina Teresita Merlot from California.

Hallie thinks the wine smells pretty good, and I happen to agree. Its got a more grapey smell than most dry reds. Its got some earthy and smokey flavors to it. That trails off into a nice berry finish. I suspect this has spent time getting intimately acquainted with an oak barrel or two. Noticeably strong alcohol, but its balanced well by some relatively strong flavors. If you've got a dinner with some strong flavors, this wine might pair well with it. Overall, this is a very good wine.

Jaime's first impression was that it was very acidic, but after letting it breathe, that seems to have gone away. She says its smooth and easy to drink. She senses a fruity flavor, probably apple-like.

Peter rates this wine a 7 out of 10. I would buy this wine.

Jaime rates this wine an 8 out of 10. She almost gave it a nine.

Garden Update

Its been modestly warm here recently (mid-upper 30's), so much of the snow we've had has now melted. The grass and hairy vetch are both matted and flattened onto the ground, but both look quite green. I'm getting worried about the grass. Its an annual and is supposed to die off over the winter, but it looks fine so far. Hopefully it won't start growing in the spring. If it does, it will be a serious pest for my vegetables!

Speaking of vegetables, my mother-in-law gave me a gift certificate to Thompson & Morgan seed company for Christmas! I've been looking through it and trying to figure out what to grow. There is a bunch of stuff I'd like to try out, but I've got to consider how much space I'll have and what vegetables I'm already going to have a lot of.

This past year I got a partial share at the Genesee Valley Organic Community Supported Agriculture. I liked having a lot of random veggies. It forced me to eat more vegetables and to try things I've never had before. It was borderline too much vegetables for me, but now that I'm living with Jaime, the partial share should be a reasonable amount. Besides, there's no guarantee that my garden will produce well, or at all, so I think we'll do a partial share again. I also don't mind supporting a few local farmers and getting reasonably priced organic food. One thing that I definitely remember having too much of last summer was lettuce. Every week I would get one or two heads. The cool wet weather last summer was probably part of the reason I got so much lettuce, but I don't see any reason for me to grow any normal lettuce in my garden if I'm doing the CSA again. Less common but really tasty stuff like Arugula...sure.

Then I had to figure out how much space I have for different kinds of vegetables, so I went out back and measured the yard. After that, I made a google spreadsheet and colored it to the dimensions of the yard. Its just like sketching it out on graph paper, but its a lot easier to change and modify. In the picture below, each grid line is 6". The black areas are the outlines of the usable space, the grey areas are theoretically usable, but are partially or fully shaded. South is basically towards the upper-left corner, maybe at 11 o'clock. The green areas are unplanted areas for walking. All the white sections are for different vegetables. Hopefully you can read what they say. Just to give some perspective, from the left edge to the right edge in the picture is about 23ft, and from top to bottom is about 17ft.

It turns out that there is quite a bit of space back there for a garden, and if everything grows well (highly unlikely), I'll be giving away vegetables. I figure its a good idea to try a bunch of different veggies and see what does or doesn't grow well. If anybody has any suggestions for what I should/shouldn't grow, let me know.

Another update on wine

While I was racking the wine after the secondary fermentation, I retained a half a glass to taste. The aroma was excellent. I'd even have to say one of the better wines I've smelled. It was still a bit sour and a surprisingly sweet. The sourness doesn't concern me too much because the acidity is supposed to drop a bit during the cold stabilization. The sweetness, on the other hand, probably isn't going to go away any more. Its not overwhelmingly sweet, but its sweeter than I would prefer. It appears that the wine didn't really ferment at all while in the secondary fermenter. I'm really not sure why that happened, unless the alcohol is high enough to inhibit this yeast. I intentionally got a yeast that has a relatively low alcohol tolerance, but I think it was supposed to be able to ferment to 14% or so. I really don't think the wine has that much alcohol in it. Perhaps all the active yeast was left on the bottom in the primary fermenter when I racked the wine into the secondary fermenter. I'm really not sure. I took a specific gravity reading also. It read 1.009. According to my October 16th blog post, it read 1.007 when I put racked it into the secondary fermenter. Hmmm. Also not really sure whats going on there, but that does confirm that no more fermentation occurred.

I'm curious to see how the flavor changes after cold stabilization and some time in a bottle. It tastes average to me now, but there is definitely room for improvement.

wine update

Its been quite a while since I've done any homemade wine updates. Thats because nothing new has been going on. Partly out of laziness and partly out of lack of time, I haven't done anything to the wine in a long time. Its just been sitting in the secondary fermenter. However, I did just recently put some clarifying agents in the wine. I used a combination of two different substances. One is Chitosan, the other is colloidal sililca. These two attract suspended particles and end up precipitating out. After about 2 days time, the wine looks much clearer. I wish I had taken a picture just before putting the clarifying stuff in. The difference is quite impressive. This is what it looks like after the clarifying agents:

After giving it a few days to settle out, I racked the wine off the sediment, rinsed out the secondary fermenter, and then put the wine back into it. The next step is to do the cold stabilization. This should precipitate out some additional acid salts and make sure that nothing precipitates out while in the bottle. This should also reduce the acidity a bit. Don't worry, though. When I did the initial calculations for how much acid to reduce, I did take into consideration that I would be doing the cold stabilization. I have a chest freezer in the basement that I was hoping to put the wine in for the cold stabilization, but at the warmest setting, the thermometer I put in reads about +1.5 degrees F. Way too cold. The wine would probably freeze at that temperature. Supposedly around 25 degrees is ideal. So the wine is now sitting in my garage. It should stay around 30-40 in there. I'll leave it there for at least a week, then it will be ready to bottle!!