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 ...

Dandelion Wine, Part III

While it seems strange in retrospect to have made only two batches of dandelion wine last year, this year having found ourselves thrust into the thick of spring activities makes it easy to know why: garden-plot digging and widening, garden-plot weeding, lawn-mowing, seed-planting ...

If dandelions would only flower more conveniently at mid-winter, we would make more of the stuff.

A greenhouse for dandelions ... not a completely irrational idea.

Retrospective accomplishments often seem sparse. Take my writing record: last year my record of publications will always look sparse, in large part because of the twenty-ton monolithic slab of C.M. Kornbluth biography that planted itself there. Comparable to the meagerness of our dandelion-wine production is the slimness of my poetry-publication record last year ... or of my short-fiction publication record ... victims of the ever-more-complex pie-cutting of my active hours ...

And how will this year look? -- especially after adding one more reason for enlarging the daily pie, to make room for this public journalizing, AKA bloggerie? ("Blog, blog, blog," Martha said to Lorna this morning while I was sitting in the parlor with pencil and notebook in hand. "It's a Blog eat Blog world.") ... but will this year look even more sparse than last?

The method behind the madness of making huge pies of one's life is Organization -- and constant Reorganization. I keep hoping the reorganizing aspect will diminish with time -- although such aspects of the situation as having no guest rooms except my workspace may guarantee forced reorganizations for years to come.

It seems promising, though, that in the course of the present weeks of house-and-life reorganizations, we have started three batches of dandelion wine, which are fermenting away in two two-gallon and one three-gallon crocks.

Cheers ...

Ancient Hairlines, Part V

At an auction today, to the north of here, I was just starting to examine a trio of large crocks when a fellow walked up and said, "Are they all right?"

I said that I thought so, and of course right at that moment detected a hairline crack in the one I was then examining.

"Know how to tell if they're good?" said this expert. "You rap them with your knuckles. They sound different if they're cracked." He rapped on the crock in front of him. It gave off a low, hollow tone. "This one's good. Rap on that one."

I gamely rapped on the one in which I had found the hairline. It had a higher, hollow tone.

"See?" he said, and walked off.

The crock in front of me was smaller, however: so of course it had a higher, hollow tone. The third crock had yet a different hollow tone -- being yet a different hollow shape.

I resumed my examination, using my inexpert means, and found hairlines in all three.

I left before the auction proceedings reached that building, so can only wonder whether the expert bought the "good" one.

I thought they all sounded good: the three crocks, and the expert. All four were cracked, though.

Cheers ...

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 ...

Ancient Hairlines, Part I

If you are a winemaker you take a different attitude toward old stoneware crocks than do other collectors of crocks. While you retain your ability to enjoy and appreciate crocks for their designs and their history, you gain a much greater abhorrence for the flaw which seems a fairly minor one to other, non-user buyers of stoneware crocks. They find this flaw not so very objectionable, to judge from their behavior at auctions.

The flaw I speak of is known as the hairline.

Sometime last year during an outdoor auction, another auction-goer came up to me after buying what I recall was an eight or ten-gallon Red Wing crock. He asked me why I had dropped out -- puzzled by an act which had allowed him to win it so cheaply.

"It has a hairline on the lip," I said.

"It does?"

He went off to look at his new purchase.

I had bid on it only because I thought it was ridiculous to stand there and watch it sell for less than $25 or $35; and I bid it up that far because I could have used the crock -- up to a point. The hairline, being on the lip, was above the line to which you would fill it, in winemaking or beermaking.

So I did my little bit of bidding and then, once the price had risen beyond screaming-bargain territory, dropped out -- because of the hairline.

A couple inches long, it detracted to a zero degree from the overall attractiveness of the crock. All the same, it was a crack. Crocks are unlike most people, and most wines, in that they would rather not improve with age. Crocks with cracks, especially.

Sometimes an undamaged crock will remain unchanged into its dotage. Yet crocks, by and large, embrace the entropic tendency of the physical universe to fall apart without getting better -- as opposed to the deferred-entropic tendency of the biological universe, which is to first grow better, second to believe itself to be getting better, and, thirdly, to become an ordinary physical object in falling apart.

If you see a crock with a crack, the one certainty that is there for you to observe is that the crack will get the better of the crock, some day.

Cheers ...

Ten to Five

In the last wine-making entry, as you may have noticed, I spoke of putting a ten-gallon stoneware crock to use -- with a five-gallon glass carboy to hold the results when going on to the next step in the winemaking process.

While I am unsure how it works in other sorts of food preparation involving crocks, with winemaking it seems that a one-gallon crock yields liquid results of less than a gallon for the secondary fermentation. If we would fill the crock to the brim, near to spilling, maybe everything would match right down the line: one-gallon stoneware for primary -- to one-gallon jug for secondary -- to one gallon of bottled wine for aging.

Filling a crock so extremely full is not my method. Some wines call for stirring, during primary fermentation: so you need a bit of extra space, for agitating it without making a mess. More significantly for our current set-up, it almost always happens that I am moving crocks and fermenters around. Last fall the primaries were in my rear work room -- while the wine-making work took place in the kitchen, which is several rooms away. Now, you try moving a crock full to the brim without making the precious wine-makings quiver and slosh.

Wear rubber clothes, if you do.

With the ten-gallon crock, I figured I could prepare a batch to fill the five-gallon carboy to an ideal level. Not so. It fell short. Maybe I lost enough liquid through evaporation; maybe I misjudged in the first place.

That crock, by the way, stayed on the work bench. I am foolhardy, but not to the extent that I would attempt to lift a massive piece of stoneware full of none-too-light liquids, let alone carry it anywhere. The makings moved into their secondary from right where the crock sat -- although I did carry that five-gallon glass secondary out to the kitchen for bottling, somehow managing not to stir up the lees despite the distance.

Cheers ...

Thinking in Terms of Quantity

I put off bottling the five-gallon carboy of LaCrosse grape wine for a goodly amount of time. Besides the fact that I have other, smaller secondaries awaiting bottling, I was aware of the number of firsts involved in this particular batch.

It is wine No. 58, in our record-keeping book -- yet, at the point I took the deep breath and began bottling it, this last Sunday afternoon, it was No. 1 in terms of being the first grape wine we would have a chance to sample. It was also our first batch of wine to be made in so large a quantity; and it was our first batch to go into one of these hefty and quite attractive glass carboys.

On top of all that, never before I had faced so much bottling.

Doing grape-picking for Vernon Vineyards for a while, in the fall, had already made me realize what potential there was, in fruit-gathering. So I had started thinking in terms of tackling quantity, someday -- when a grape-picking opportunity arose, late in the season -- after the first snows, in fact ... although the day Martha and Lorna and I were out among the vines was sunny and warmish and lovely.

As chance would have it, the day before, at an auction in Sparta, we had picked up a ten-gallon stoneware crock, Red Wing -- an older one, with the large wing-stamp.

The timing was such that we bought the crock one day and poured into it some five or six gallons of fruit-pressings the next, and started this LaCrosse wine on its primary fermentation.

Cheers ...