Oh what fun we’ve had creating a product line. A lot of people bake, can and bottle all sorts of things, but I’m not sure they all develop a brand. This is a problem when your household is full of marketing and design people. We brand our own goods. Ah, but what fun we’ve had. Now that we’ve had a taste with this, wait until next year.

Our most popular products are the wines. We’ve only  opened a bottle of the Black Raspberry and were extremely surprised. It is a dry red wine with berry overtones. The wine is outstanding and exceeded our expectations. Suddenly those hours of fighting thorns and mosquitoes were worth it. Next summer I believe we will pick berries with more enthusiasm. The Rhubarb wine is sweet and will be used as a desert wine. The Gooseberry wine will not be ready until this summer, but our sneak preview tests suggest it will be superb. It has many layers of intense flavor. I will report more as time goes on.

Until then, we will enjoy all of our other products.

Hi. Lori posted these photos a few months back. I was supposed to add some words of wisdom. But I really could not because the wine was not ready to drink, hence no words of wisdom were forthcoming. Now with a glass in hand, here I go.

Our last installment found Lori and I trudging through the woods, fighting thorns and mosquitoes (but not each other…I love you hon). After we gathered the appropriate tonnage, the berries were mashed and left to…basically rot. Eventually the mash was filtered, the liquid was put in big bottles and put in a cool dark place in our basement.

Now it was the yeast’s turn. Happy bugs in jugs. The best thing for us to do is just leave everything alone. Which was just fine with me.

Except that cool dark place in the basement also happened to be the top of our wood burning furnace. With cold weather coming on, that place was not going to be so cool and dark. I remember, when I first put the jugs up there, thinking “this would be a great place to put the wine because we needed to bottle the wine about the same time we needed to start heating with wood, which would force us to bottle the wine.” Pretty clever, huh?

Now the more clever procrastinators among you might just say “Chuck, why don’t you just move the jugs?” But if you look closely, you will see a layer of sediment on the bottom of the jugs. Moving the jugs would stir that up. Time to bottle.

Being locovores and all, we were committed to using free-range, locally produced (at our dinner table) bottles. So now it was time to clean the bottles. Lots of them…

Here is a fancy device that fits on the faucet for rinsing out all the soap.

Below is the magic cleaning fluid that we use for the final rinse of the bottles. It kills all wild bugs that could spoil the wine. It’s some fancy peroxide that rapidly decomposes into water and oxygen. Therefore it does not need to be rinsed from the bottles and will not affect the flavor of the wine. Better living through chemistry!

Letting the bottles dry a little…

Next we siphon the wine into another big jug to separate it from the sediment on the bottom.

Time to siphon the wine into bottles.

Put in some corks…

Isn’t that beautiful!!! Two gallons of rhubarb wine, made with rhubarb that grows about 100 ft from our house.

For those of you who might want to give this a try, I got my recipes from Making Wild Wines and Meads. As written, these recipes produced pretty sweet and very strong wines.
Here’s a quick lesson in wine making. The yeast consumes the sugar and converts it into alcohol. This process stops when one of two things happens: 1) the yeast runs out of sugar giving a very dry wine or 2) the yeast dies of alcohol poisoning - giving a strong sweet wine, like the recipes in the book.

We prefer a dry wine, so we cut back on the sugar. To get the right amount of sugar, we used a hydrometer to measure the specific gravity of the starting liquid; we just added sugar until the specific gravity was 1.100. That is definitely the way to get the sugar right.

The drawback of this process is it produces a very dry wine. There is no sweetness at all. If you want a wine with a trace of sweetness, there are two options: 1) at bottling time add sugar to taste and then add a metabisulphite tablet to kill the yeast or 2) add sugar when it is time to drink the wine. The advantage of the first option is if you give your wine to others they will be able to taste it exactly as you planned. The disadvantage is that if the yeast is not all killed, it can start fermenting again and the bottles can explode. The second option avoids that problem. This is the option we chose.

So now it’s Christmas time and time to starting drinking the wine. The rhubarb and black raspberry wine only need to age for about 6 months and probably should not be aged more than a year. The book says the gooseberry wine should be aged at least a year… not sure we can wait that long.

Every now and then I take a favorite photo. This is the photo for this week.

It is with great sadness and great joy we say good-bye to Ginger. She will have a new home with an owner seeking a best friend.

Here’s mother and daughter—everyone is waiting around for Ginger’s ride to show up.

Some day I’m sure Ginger and Athena will see each other again. Ginger isn’t that far away and we will be sure to join each other at a horse show. I look forward to the reunion.

Durango may miss Ginger most of all. He was rather infatuated with her.

Durango and Athena will have to learn how to get along, they only have each other until April when Monty returns.

I’m sure they will work it out.

Ginger, you’re a beautiful horse and we will miss you.

I am happy to report, all ducks are home.

One of the wonderful things about living on this farm are the beautiful picture windows. This is the side house view.

This is one of my favorite trees right outside the house.

Here is the view from the front. It is a great window to watch the deer cross the road.

So far this is my favorite. I hope to get outside more with the camera, but I see the winds are really picking up.

I opened the door for the squawking ducks and clucking chickens. I was curious about their reaction to this weather.

The ducks immediately went trudging through the heavy snow.

And one chicken decided to take her chances.

She didn’t get very far—made it about 20 feet. I’m not sure if her legs are still on the ground. I can’t imagine how difficult this is for her.

I picked her up and pulled off the snowballs  stuck on her feathers and brought her back inside. I wish the ducks would come back inside. The winds are starting to pick up. I will have to go find them at noon and chase them home.

It usually seems that when everyone gets so hyped up about a big storm, it misses us completely. The university closed down the night before (never happens). Schools were closing, all nonessential government offices were closing. Since this storm was covering half of the United States, and we live some what in the middle, we were bound to get hit.

And we did. I must sayit is beautiful, but walking is laborious. I worked up a sweat going from the house to the barn.

The horses are all tucked in safe and sound. My job today (and tomorrow) will be giving them hay and cleaning their stalls. Tomorrow temperatures will be well into the negatives. But right now, if you’re out of the wind, it isn’t so bad.

And it is very pretty to look at.

Duke will get plenty of exercise. He has to leap through the snow. If you’re wondering what happened to his coat, the Velcro on the strap filled with snow and will no longer stick. But with all the leaping he will do, I think he’ll stay plenty warm.

The chickens lay eggs in the same box, which is convenient for us, but their philosophy is to gather enough eggs to make it worth hatching. If they get a dozen or so in the same place they will take turns warming the eggs. Sorry chickens, a) we won’t let you get a dozen in one place b) they are not fertilized so no matter how long you sit on them, they won’t hatch.