My house currently smells like a pizza joint, and I love it. It’s a perfect blend of yeasty, bubbling grape must and salsa canning. The wife is converting the last fruits of our garden into mild salsa (for her) and mostly jalapeño salsa (for me). For my part, I’m a hobby vinedresser and vintner. Within six months of buying our current house, I planted twenty-five malbec vines all over my back yard. (Each adult vine is capable of producing sixty pounds of grapes for a total of 1500 pounds!) Nine years later, I’m getting a pretty nice annual harvest. Due to the hot summer, I harvested sixteen gallons of squished-up malbec berries last weekend (a bit earlier than normal).
The last few days have consisted of “punching down” the must (all the skins and seeds that rise to the top of the buckets due to the rapid fermentation process) and dealing with the fact that no matter how many years I do this I always forget how much space to leave in the top of the buckets in order to prevent grape goo from overflowing all over the kitchen floor.
This year was no exception.
Me (in conversation with the wife): Is this enough space to keep it from bubbling over?
The Wife: I don’t know. How much space did you leave last year? Because it wasn’t enough.
Me [shrugs]: I don’t know. Probably less than this.
The Wife: Why don’t you measure?
Me [holding up grape juice encrusted hands]: It’s probably six inches.
The Wife [rolls eyes and fetches a tape measure]: It’s five inches.
Me: Seems like enough.
Four days later…
The Wife: Your buckets are overflowing. Wanna do something about that?
Me: Hmmm, I guess I needed six inches.
Twenty-four hours later, all is good. The fermentation process has slowed, and I’m prepping to rack the juice off of the must for the secondary fermentation phase. I even managed to keep our bunny from indulging in the overflow, which I’m guessing would have resulted in a trip to the vet. Not due to the alcoholic content, but for the fact that rabbits and grapes don’t mix very well. The fumes have probably been enough to give him a bit of trip these past few days. Now that I mention it, he has seemed a little extra giddy.
And that gets me to my main point. Most people probably think of the Biblical Noah as the guy who built the ark. And that’s true. But I’m most grateful to Noah for being the first person to ferment grapes. Known as a master farmer, Noah clearly recognized the most valuable crop for investing his efforts. I won’t even hold it against him that he got a little carried away with sampling the product. I mean, can you imagine the discovery? “Hey, honey! You gotta try this. It’s so much better than the jelly you’ve been making!” The wife is not impressed by the insult. Noah ends up spending the night in his own tent. The rest is history. (Throw in some curses, blah, blah, blah.)
Hey, it’s October. You’ve made it through another summer, another harvest, another year. Raise your glass and tip it back. Salud!
At the Desk This Week
I’m buzzing through my final rewriting process with the third season of the Green Ones and having a fun time with it. I just came across a bit of an internal error that I’ll have to slow down to fix. It appears that I had one of the characters not knowing about more than two of the universes in the multiverse at one point in the story and then knowing about many more than two a bit later on. He got caught in a lie that plays an important role in the developing relationship with my main protag…so I gotta figure out how much he knew and when. This is the kind of stuff I expected to find due to the fact that I took long breaks between working sprints on this project. No worries, I’ll get it cleaned up!
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