Finally bottled last year’s wine, 24 bottles of grape and 24 of crabapple. I didn’t make the same mistake I made two years ago with adding the sweetener without vitamin C to stop fermentation from starting again.
I’m getting a little bit neater at bottling. Though I made a mess when I first started, the siphoning process seems a bit beyond me and took a while to realize that if I raised the bottle above the level in the five-gallon jug, I could smoothly stop the flow and fill the next one. Once I got the hang of it, things went more smoothly. That is, after I sopped up wine off the floor, sprayed on the cabinets, and all over me.
Every year I swear I’ll never make wine again. Then the crop comes due, peaches turn rosy, crabapples sparkle on branches, the grapes hang in heavy bunches, and I don’t have it in me to let it all go to waste. Wine, believe it or not, is still easier to make than jelly or canning the fruit and when you get a bumper crop, that’s the fastest way to handle the load.
After a bit too much tasting of wine, I made a mess of fried shrimp for dinner and luckily read the recipe this time to find that you dust the shrimp (or fish) in the dry mix first, then add a cup of cold beer to the rest of the mix to make a batter that will stick and not simply slide off.
This was perfect with a onion and garden tomato sliced into balsamic vinegar as a summer meal.
Oh yes, and a civilized glass of wine.
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