Glimpses of a Fruitless Future

Even though spring wines have worked out for us more often than some late-season wines, I may forgo them this year——being busy with writing, with antiquing——and with fretting over the step I want to take with the spring dandelion blossoms and rhubarb stalks. I want to use them in wines sweetened only with grapes, either by the traditional method of using raisins or the contemporary method of buying the must——pairing dandelion with white grapes, and rhubarb with white or red.

I may yet talk myself into starting anew along this line of experimenting——yet still must face the questions: can I afford to take the time this year, when I am trying to make good on some greatly overdue project deadlines; and can I afford organic must——especially during spring auction season?

Yesterday morning, not too early but early enough that the air was cool and lacked the humidity it would take on later in the day, Martha and I were standing by our young Cortland apple, admiring its blooms——and seeing not a single ground bee at the blossoms. The sun shined; the night had been cool, not cold. Even the sand cherry, with its abundant smaller white blooms, attracted no notice except our own.

I feel it is one thing for agribusiness, monocropping and factory farming to take away our honey bees, and quite another for it to take away native bees. The first act represents an assault against civilization and tradition: for apiculture and Western culture have come down to us over the centuries and perhaps millennia hand-in-hand. The second represents an assault against the native North American ecosystem, which has been struggling against pressures created by the human communal lifestyle for fifteen thousand years or more but especially since the 18th century.

The vineyard where I worked for a time is as much a suspect in the local area's bee problems as are the much larger corn and soybean monocroppers.

The owner of that vineyard rarely praised an organic grower. I recall him doing so just once, one morning when he spoke admiringly of an organic corn field. What pleased him, in other words, was this farm's example of factory-style monocropping, which it practiced even if certified for its adherence to organic-farming methods.

On the other hand, the owner of that vineyard seized any opportunity that arose to ridicule or criticize organic growers, especially small ones——always, of course, in his affable, nicest-guy-around manner.

Monsanto herbicide made up part of the vineyard's arsenal. I could have examined the containers for the fungicides and pesticides being used, but never did, closely——not that I would have recognized the neonicotinoids on the ingredients lists.

The vineyard owner used other toxins and poisons in the vineyard, too. One day when our Scottiedog was there with Martha and I, Lorna began throwing up, repeatedly——an incident that may have helped cause or hasten the digestive-system problem that killed her before we had finished our time with the vineyard.

Neonicotinoids rank high among suspects in the collapse of bee populations——a problem that made itself more severely felt this last winter than in previous ones. Yesterday, in doing some reading on the issue, I learned that wine grapes number among the crops that typically, in agrifactory anti-culture practice, receive neonicotinoids.

I will drink the wine that I have remaining from the vineyard, which I made. One case of it, in fact, I made from organically raised grapes from a different farm. From this time forward, however, I will be feeling qualms about wine grapes lacking organic certification. I have known since the 1980s that table grapes are one food above all to eat only if grown organically: but the attractions of wine and wine-making made this knowledge about vineyard practices recede from my thoughts, for quite a while.

Later yesterday I went into the backyard again and did see native bees, although not in a profusion——and I even saw a probable honey bee. After our morning visit to the garden, which had scared us with its lack of bee action, at this warmer hour I felt a bit reassured——although not inclined to alter the thoughts that had growing in my mind during the morning.

Just now in the front yard I looked at the blooms on our youngest apple, a Wealthy. Sunshine, breeze, sixty-nine degrees, eleven a.m. Nary an insect about. Around the tree, in the lawn: beautiful bright dandelion blooms, perfect for picking.

And beeless.

Cheers ...

Raw Wines

"Raw," in our household term for certain wines, refers to the treatment of the essential ingredients in the first stages of wine-making.

While winemakers besides us must have a term at hand that carries the same meaning, we lack knowledge of any such ... so we keep speaking of "raw wines." (I half suspect some passing note in H.E. Bravery or Terry Garey suggested or gave us the term, though.)

The basic ingredients in a raw wine are used in a raw state; in a cooked wine, in a cooked state. The spring wines offer a nice illustration of the difference.

Dandelion wine, as we have made it thus far, is a cooked wine: the water is boiled and then poured, while still boiling-hot, over the flowers. (This stage of dandelion winemaking we do in enamelware, not in a crock; the water-and-flower mixture then cools, while covered.)

Rhubarb wine, on the other hand, is a raw wine: the water is boiled, as a sterilizing measure, then allowed to cool in a covered enamelware pot. Only after cooling is it poured over rhubarb pieces.

As it happens, we have never attempted a cooked rhubarb wine. One early recipe we found -- early in our winemaking, and early in its publication date ... as I recall, around the earlier 1900s -- was a rhubarb wine recipe. Simple though it was, it seems to have pointed us in the right direction for quality home winemaking.

Cheers ...

Rhubarb Wine

A five-gallon crock ... plus just an awful lot of chopped rhubarb ... with the crock filled to maybe the four-gallon level.

With there being so much liquid within rhubarb stalks, I figured I might have enough to fill a three-gallon secondary fermenter.

Such was the volume of rhubarb remaining that I had enough for only two one-gallon secondaries, when I emptied the crock two days ago.

For this batch, I had only chopped the rhubarb, not crushing it with a rolling pin as I had last year. The rhubarb pieces were still holding onto a fair amount of liquid within them. By the simple expedient of leaving the chopped, fermented rhubarb in a stainless steel colander overnight, I might have managed to get some of that third gallon. I probably should have had our small fruit press ready, to crush out the remaining juices.

I did, at least, leave the pieces in our largest stainless steel bowl overnight. By morning, it was evident some liquid had settled out. So our refrigerator now has a quart jar of much-too-new rhubarb wine in it. Have I tasted the wine? Strangely enough, no.

I ate a piece of the rhubarb, though: crunchy, tangy. Yesterday was another unseasonable day -- still over 90 degrees after 5 p.m. ... in May! -- so that it was in the evening, some twenty hours after working on the wine, that I dumped the partially alcoholified rhubarb pieces in a patch of dirt that I had been preparing for some planting. Air temperatures had dipped below 90; humidity was such that I sweated away only half my body weight every fifteen minutes. I forked the rhubarb wine remains into the dirt: for were not the rhubarb pieces already biologically composted, to some degree? I plan to plant in that dirt some squash vines that were volunteers in our compost bin.

Cheers ...

Wooden Spoon

A rather nice and somewhat accidental purchase at an auction last Saturday is a wooden spoon long enough to comfortably reach the bottom of a five-gallon crock while still leaving ample room for the grip. I had no thought about this spoon's being just a little longer than normal until this morning when I plucked it out of the kitchen crock that holds these utensils (this crock being a salt-glaze with a bottom hairline inside -- so a piece to ease the eye, not one to employ as a tool to help fulfill imbibitory ambitions) and used said spoon for the first time in stirring wines.

The spoon stirred up this thought, at least:

That our second two batches of dandelion wine might go on into their secondaries any time now: for when stirred, their fizz dies soon after the stirring ends.

The rhubarb wine, first batch of the year, is the one in the five-gallon crock. It should stay in that primary fermenter a bit longer. The yeast's work is greater, in breaking down the rhubarb fibers.

Stirring wine in a crock is lovely work. You do it in a few moments -- and in those passing seconds have done so fine a job that you can forget about doing the job again for a day.

Once I move these batches of dandelion into secondaries, I will have no call to be stirring that particular wine again, this year. Around here, the flowers have largely given way to the seed heads that are so pleasing to the seed-eating finches.

Strange, as always, how the riotous season of dandelion shock-yellow brilliance ends so soon.

Cheers ...

Sunday's Rhubarb Wine and Eggs: a Recipe

After you have had your potatoes cooking for a time in a covered cast-iron pan, open a bottle of rhubarb wine. Decant it carefully, and serve.

In a mixing bowl, put in four or more eggs. If yours are like the organic jumbos we have been obtaining recently, this will mean you will have anywhere from six to eight yolks. If your eggs are the small sort with but a single yolk, you might increase their number, for this recipe. Into your eggs throw the dregs of the rhubarb wine that remained in the bottle. Mix well.

When the potatoes are cooked, take cover off, that they might brown in the pan. Allow time for that, then oil a copper-bottom steel frying pan large enough for omelette-making. Add a bit of butter. When hot, pour in eggs; allow to cook at medium flame. When the eggs are solid across the pan surface, but not quite so at their upper surface, place a half-cup or so of chopped parmesan cheese atop half. Fold the eggs over. Continue cooking for long enough to set the table.

Enjoy, then, with the rest of the rhubarb wine.

Cheers ...

Sunniness

Martha took off Tuesday from her job, which has to do with organic maple syrup. Monday had been a rough day, for her: so to make Tuesday as sunny inside as it was outside I pulled from the basement, to go with lunch, a bottle of Wine 25. Since we had bottled this batch on the third of this month, it has had little time to mature and go about its final clarification.

While it was not ready, we were -- a situation that allowed for compromise, in our favor.

Last year's winemaking was all a specific kind of experiment; and of its results the wines that gave us greatest hope for future efforts were the rhubarb ones. I was using ample sliced-up lemons in those wines -- organic, whenever possible -- and so those wines had a strong edge given them by the peel. This rhubarb was our first of the sort we would call raw wines. Since the quite-simple recipe I had found in an old cookbook made no mention of cooking the rhubarb, I instead heated the water, to sterilize it, and let it cool before pouring it over the wine's ingredients.

That rhubarb wine was, as I recall, also the first I started in a stoneware crock, a Red Wing three-gallon. Our experience would be that crock-started wines succeeded to a greater degree than did glass-container ones, although glass in general seemed fine; and it was tremendously better than steel-container wines, which were the most apt to go astray into vinegary territory.

I remember us sitting in the backyard on a summery day and trying some of that first rhubarb. We marveled at its beautiful, lightly tinted clarity, and at the wonderful sense of freshness, a quite dry freshness, about it. It went well with being drenched by sunlight. I believe I made the batch too dry -- which in this instance means its alcohol was not high. Yet we were pleased. Such promise! A wine of encouragement.

Cheers ...