Growing grapes and making wine in Bellevue
Posted in mead on Jun 5th, 2007
It used to be pretty common for meadmakers to boil the honey-water mixture, but more and more are preparing their meads without heat. Ken Schramm makes a good case for the no-heat method in his The Compleat Meadmaker : Home Production of Honey Wine From Your First Batch to Award-winning Fruit and Herb Variations. Adherents […]
Posted in enology on Jun 4th, 2007
I wrote about sur lie and batonnage, aging on fine lees and lees stirring, recently. After six months of weekly stirring, this process can benefit the wine (or mead?) by making it seem sweeter and less harsh. Scientists have studied this process and isolated the compounds responsible for this effect. These compounds have been packaged […]
Posted in misc on Jun 3rd, 2007
Steam Engine In A Sports Car: Using a film camera to illustrate my blog
I own two cameras: a Ricoh KR-5 and a Yashica T4. Both are 35mm film cameras. The Ricoh is a manual SLR and the Yashica is a point-and-shoot. They’re great cameras, and when I started, I intended to use them to illustrate […]
Posted in maintenance & cleaning on Jun 2nd, 2007
In an episode of MASH, Winchester complains that he’s the only one making an effort to keep the tent, that he shares with Hawkeye and Trapper-or-BJ (it’s been long enough that I get those two confused), tidy. The other two make messes, and he cleans them up. “It may not be a good system,” admits […]
Posted in enology on Jun 1st, 2007
Winemakers can spend a fair amount of time racking. They do this to separate clear wine from it’s sediment (called “lees”). It’s more than just clear wine that motivates them; decaying grape, or other fruit, solids can encourage spoilage organisms and extended contact with decaying yeast can cause off flavors. So, an important rule in […]