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 ...

Call It Aging, If You Will

Hours pass with seemingly small result; yet they are necessary hours.

Same way, months.

This past Sunday I spent time in kitchen sterilizing bottles, doing a little bottling of wines from their secondaries, and a bit of racking of other wines that were in less-than-gallon bottles. Martha was a little alarmed yesterday when looking at beer recipes to find that a porter she plans to make soon will take eight weeks. These wines I was moving from container to container were ones started in June, in July, in August. Since most of the source ingredients grew in our backyard, the timeline might be shoved back even farther.

Red currants seem to have grown in this area for what may be, in human terms, forever. When this house was built, around 1900, woods had more of a foothold; and hereabouts red currants are part of the woods. The plant from which we harvested was one we planted, though. We did so just to the west of the grapes, thinking they would be shaded in morning -- a consideration we are no longer sure was necessary, since for most of our backyard getting away from the shade of surrounding trees is more the issue. Since this is the first real red currant wine for us, it has been several years in the making -- if measured from our planning, digging and planting.

As a wine, though, it is only around its sixth month or so. Almost halfway there, to the wine-bottling mind. Yet all wines are drinkable after first fermentation, if perhaps not quite desirably so. Sitting down to a gallon crock of new wine would not be most people's idea of a palate-pleasing time. Aging works wonders, when the aging is done properly. Finding out what "properly" means, at all stages of the process, is part of the experiment.

And I think at times that this finding-out is a means to age myself more properly than I have managed to do at many points in the past.

Cheers ...