(RED), (RED) Wine

My sweetie Debbie brought home a bottle of my favorite wine, Penfolds’ Koonunga[1] Hill. While feverishly ripping the cork out I noticed the label looked all goofy:

(Penfolds) RED

What’s that, I wondered. Dumbing down the label for people who don’t know it’s a red wine? I looked it up and Project (RED) is about fighting for an AIDS free generation. (RED) partners donate a part of their profits to fight AIDS.

Well, good on you Penfolds. I’ll just have to do my part by buying more of your products!


1. Pronounced Koo-nun-ga, not Koon-un-ga. Just in case you don’t speak Australian.

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New Day

On Saturday Wine Time in Fort Wayne had a tasting for New Day Meadery of Elwood, Indiana. Saturday was cold, windy, and drizzling, and Wine Time has their tastings outside. But no hardship is too great to prevent tasting wine!

Mead is wine made from honey. It can be dry or sweet. Dry mead without anything added looks like white wine, but has a distinctive earthy/honey taste to it.

New Day had 4 meads to taste; a pure dry mead, a dry mead with peaches, a dry mead with blueberries, and a dry mead with red raspberries. New Day gets their fruit from our own local Blueberry Acres, just east of Churubusco.

The meads were all splendid. They were professionally crafted products, clear with no off-flavors. I particularly enjoyed the fruit meads. If you like red raspberries the red raspberry mead was bursting with raspberry flavor.

I brought home a blueberry mead.

Blueberry Mead

Looks like a rosé, doesn’t it? And like a rosé it tastes best with just a little chill to it.

New Day Meadery – cheers!

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A Good Day

With harvest wrapped up for 2010 things are returning to normal here at Skunk Hill. I still have about 90 acres to spray for weeds this fall, but there was a chance of rain today (didn’t materialize, as has been the norm here since July) and I really wanted a day off. So I took my first day off since we started harvest back on September 18th.

In the morning I picked all the open-pollinated white corn I’d planted with our sweet corn. I had a couple of bushels, I’d guess. I intend to make that into whiskey this winter. Oh wait, that’s illegal. I’m going make it into ethanol to power my vehicles.

Then I went to Orchard Hill Farms near Kendallville to get apples and cider. It’s a very nice operation, if you’re in need of apples or cider it’s a pleasant drive on an autumn day.

The cider I’m turning into apple wine. I’m taking special care to keep the equipment clean and to kill the wild yeasts to try to defeat the off taste I keep getting in my wine.

It’s a deary day, so I decided to make cassoulet for supper. I’m loosely following a Michael Schlow recipe, but since I didn’t have the ingredients he calls for; lamb, garlic sausages, and duck confit I’m doing a Hoosier version with country spareribs, bratwurst, and a chicken leg quarter. It’s smelling ridiculously good with about an hour of cooking time left. The best thing about this Schlow recipe is that it calls for a cup of wine. What to do with the rest of the bottle? I’m sure I’ll think of something!

Now that I’m a man of leisure again, it’s time to resume exercising. I put in half an hour on the treadmill walking. I’m going to try to ease back into running, but I’m not sure my aching feet, ankles, and knees are going to allow that.

I finished reading Anthony Bourdain’s book “Medium Raw” today. An excellent read, I highly recommend it. If you haven’t read his “Kitchen Confidential” you should read it first though. A lot of “Medium Raw” is explaining or expanding on “Kitchen Confidential.” Note: if you’re easily offended you’ll want to avoid anything Bourdain writes. He’s foul-mouthed and irreverent.

While the cassoulet was finishing I considered recipes based around beer. (Corn whiskey, apple wine, cooking with wine, cooking with beer – my entire life does not rotate around alcohol. Really.) Last night Dan Comparet (who’s a homebrewer) and I were talking about doing a dinner themed around different home brewed beers. So I was looking at recipes today and considering such yummy sounding creations as “Chocolate Porter Cake.”

The sun is setting on Skunk Hill. It’s time to eat the cassoulet and appreciate what a good day it’s been.

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The First of the Summer Wine

I bottled my dandelion wine today. It had been settling and clearing for 3 and a half months and was looking nice and clear, so I figured it was time.

First step (after cleaning the bottle and all equipment) was to transfer the wine from the carboys into bottles.

Filling Bottles

It’s just transferring with a siphon. You put one end of the tube in the carboy and then suck on the other end until you get wine. Unlike siphoning gas, it’s an added bonus when you get a mouthful. Put the other end in your empty wine bottle and the wine flows. On the bottle end there’s a little gadget that when you lift the hose out of a full bottle it stops the flow until you press against the inside of the next bottle. Slick.

After the bottles are filled it’s time to cork them. In the good old days they pounded the cork in with a hammer. In these modern times I get out yet another gadget to cork the bottles.

Corker

You put the cork in the gadget and press the handles down and it pushes the cork into the bottle. It takes a pretty good push to seat the cork. If you’re not careful to keep yourself square to the bottle and push evenly, the whole contraption can go skittering across the counter with wine and profanity flying everywhere.

When buying store bought wine, I usually make my selections based on the attractiveness of the label. I’ll be sure to enjoy my dandelion wine more with a nice label.

An Attractive Label

Who could resist that bottle?

This is all very nice, but what about what really matters? How does it taste? Let’s find out.

Down the Hatch

Debbie said it tasted like drinking dandelion greens. Using winespeak you could say it is overly vegetal. Either one of those is a fairly accurate assessment. It’s not unpleasant to drink, at least if you like dandelion greens, but it definitely has too much green taste. I left the wine sit on dandelions about 6 days which must’ve been too much.

I can sum it up with a quote from the best movie ever, “quaffable but far from transcendent.”

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Mead Day

I bottled my mead today.

Mead bottles

If you can read the labels you can see it’s an orange and spice mead.  It’s a bit spicy for my taste, I’d use a little less spice (cinnamon and cloves) next time.  But it’ll make a nice spiced wine for the holidays.   It made 4 bottles, one is in the refrigerator to see how it tastes chilled.

It also packs a wallop.  I didn’t check the Brix before I fermented it, but from the taste I’d suspect I’m at 15%+ alcohol.

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Busy as a Bee

I harvested one frame from my beehive this week.

Beehive

The hive setting is every bit as idyllic as the picture looks.  I built a bench to put out there by it and I like to sit there and watch the bees.  It’s very peaceful.

I harvested just one frame from the hive.  I don’t have a honey extractor, but I had read that you could just allow the honey to drain from the frame if you weren’t in a hurry.  I read that on the Internet, so I had no reason to doubt it.  Nonetheless I was skeptical.  Being skeptical and not wanting to have 9 frames of honey and no way to get the honey out, I just pulled one frame from the hive.

I took that one frame, uncapped it, put it over a shallow tray, and set it in the oven overnight so bugs and the cat wouldn’t crawl over it during the night.

Do you see where this tale is going?

Yes, sure enough, the next evening I flipped the oven on to preheat for supper.  A few minutes later the house was filling with the aroma of warm honey.  I lunged for the oven (and said a bad word), it had preheated to 250 degrees, and yanked the honey tray out.  The honey and beeswax and frame foundation was all well-extracted and had melted into a pool in the tray.  I poured it all through a fine sieve which took out out the wax and foundation and other unidentified bits.  The result was just over a quart of very nice honey.

Now what to do with it?  We don’t really use all that much honey so I decided to make mead.  I picked an orange and spice recipe that is supposed to be very forgiving.  A quart of honey is what you need for a gallon of mead, so here’s a gallon jug of honey, water, oranges, spices, and yeast perking away.

Mead Day 1

Within an hour of mixing it all up the yeast was working, bubbling furiously and turning that sugar into alcohol.  This recipe is supposed to take two months, just in time for a nice spiced wine for Christmas.

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Tasting Time

We went to Wine Time today in Jefferson Pointe for a wine tasting. They had the wine tasting set up outside (it’s 40 degrees, gray and rainy in the heartland today, the poor people staffing it…)

They had a nice selection to taste, I particularly liked the Valpolicella and Pinot Noir. They had clam chowder from Joseph Decuis and duck from Maple Leaf Farms for tasting too.

It was well attended while we were there, and it is just so good to see Jeff Armstrong and Wine Time succeeding.

Tomorrow is our anniverary and we always buy a bottle of wine to lay down to have in a future year and remember the times we’ve enjoyed together. Jeff recommended a Rioja to us, it’s now in the cellar, to see the light again in about 2012, when we’ll open it and remember all that happened 2006 and the wine tasting at Wine Time on a gray November day.

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R Bistro

We visited R Bistro in Indianapolis for my birthday. It’s a chef owned, kitchen driven restaurant specializing in fresh locally produced food. Sort of like Chez Panisse in the heartland (only not quite so goofy).

The food was everything you’d expect from this sort of place. It’s not a prix-fixe menu, but they change the menu each week, and there are 5 appetizers, 5 main courses, and 5 desserts.

Our meals were splendid. I started with a watermelon and prosciutto appetizer.  Different from the usual combination of melon and prosciutto, the sweet crunchy watermelon was a nice contrast to the buttery smooth rich prosciutto.  It was though a little watery as you might expect.

My main course was lamb chops which were cooked as perfectly as anything I’ve ever eaten.

Dessert was a berry shortcake, quite nice.

The wine list was small and reasonably priced.  We had a Ridge 3 Valleys (I’ve been reading Hugh Johnson’s, A Life Uncorked and he’s a big Ridge fan) that was very tasty and not expensive.

My only complaint was the service.  There were long gaps between being seated and ordering.  Our server disappeared for long stretches and wasn’t attentive.  At the end of dessert she just plopped the bill on the table and took off.  We were hoping to cap the meal with a glass of port or coffee, but we weren’t feeling too welcome at that point, so we took our leave.

I’d definitely recommend R Bistro.  From watching the other tables service, I think our server was just having a bad night or something.

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