Ancient Hairlines, Part II

As I said, a cracked old man has only one option for the future -- which is to get worse.

I mean, a cracked old crock has.

You can use the lower portions of a crock, if it has a hairline in the upper portions, when making wine or beer -- but while you do so you will be haunted vaguely by thoughts of the future, when that hairline must inevitably grow larger.

A stoneware crock in use for winemaking is not a static eye-pleaser in the parlor corner but an active piece of necessary equipment. If it plays a part in the winemaking life, it has no fixed place, physically, in the home. It moves from place to place. It receives cleaning and sterilizings, in the sink or bathtub. It may feel the stirrings-around of a wooden spoon, or the pressing force of hands, masher or muddler, in crushing fruit. The crock will be lifted, turned on its side, upended. It will be carried, tipped, shelved.

The five-gallon Western stoneware crock I bought last summer in a local auction has a hairline, as it happens. In the dirty state the crock was in when I bid on it, I never saw the crack -- which is an extra-fine hairline: "Hardly a crack at all," I can hear a collector say. Fortunately, this crack is located on the quite-fat rim; and the crock has proved itself serviceable during the making of a fair amount of wine and beer already. In fact today, as I am working on this posting, I happen to be sterilizing it for the batch of beer Martha is starting this rainy afternoon.

Cheers ...

On the First Floor

Here on the first floor of our house we have, at the moment, a five-gallon crock (Western Stoneware, with a maple-leaf decoration) full of beer Martha made which may go into a secondary fermenter today; and a three-gallon Red Wing crock with sorghum beer that I started last Friday. And in the back room is a five-gallon carboy with LaCrosse grape wine in its secondary-fermentation stage, which I suppose I could start bottling any day now. Martha was kind enough to order in some corks with her latest beer-making supplies.

I was just thinking of these, and then of the unknown numbers of gallons of wine in secondary fermentation in the basement -- not a huge amount; but the variety is not bad -- and was thinking, too, how similar the situation is to my miscellaneous writing projects. Who knows how many I have, in the basement. Here on the main living floor, I have just a few projects in active or semi-active state.

I just checked my wine-making notes. The carboy of wine is mostly LaCrosse grapes, with some Edelweiss, and also some that I thought might be the Alpenglow variety. All these were grown by Bob at Vernon Vineyards, in nearby Vernon County. All are northern grape varieties; all are Elmer Swenson varieties. In LaCrosse, a white grape, I remember the bunches being tightly packed and compact. The Edelweiss are a large white-Concord-type, extremely flavorful. The Alpenglow have a slight, quite attractive blush to the skin.

Homegrown hops, by the way, went into the sorghum beer.