Category: Whine on the Porch

Small towns and porches go together like cats and window sills, dogs and dove hunting, laughter and good times. And, nothing goes together better than friends, a big deep porch, and very good wine. With that combo, we’ll solve the worlds problems. At least we’ll talk about them over wine on the porch.

Forgive and Remember

While our biological drives haven’t changed or evolved, our learning and culture has. We can choose to remember and not repeat the past. We can choose to forgive those who came before and remember what came before so we don’t repeat it. But we have to CHOOSE and ACT to not repeat it.

The craziness of what is going on in the U.S. today is on my mind. What got me started specifically was the public lynch mobs rioting and protesting who want to punish people who are not guilty of any crime.

I’m a biologist by education. I accept that evolution occurs. However, biologically there isn’t much evolution or change that can occur in a large population of organisms. Humans are living organisms. But at least in humans our learning ability allows us to have a culture do and can change. This also got me to thinking about a plaque I saw on a wall once. It said “forgive and remember”. I think I get it now.

Regarding the past. Be angry, be mad, that is okay, so long as you move forward from it, forgive yourself and forgive others, just REMEMBER IT! Do not repeat it. It is, what it is. It can’t be changed. You don’t get to go back and “do over” on things that already happened. You do get the chance to make it different the next time a similar thing comes along. YOU can choose to react differently, choose to make a different choice, choose to participate or not. Lots of folks think history is stupid, learning it is a waste of time. I don’t. Why? If you don’t know what led up to stupidity (or greatness) how can you avoid stupidity or not avoid greatness in the future.

Anyway, back to the original thought line… thinking of history in terms of years is pretty unbelievable. If I say in 800 A.D. xxy happened or in year 10 B.C. zxy happened it doesn’t seem too real. But I knew my grandpa and he saw and told me about things that happened when he was young, that’s easy to believe. What about his grandpa, and his, and his, and that chain of people is much easier to comprehend. And you know what? in that chain of grandpa’s, suddenly we are at a time when something very important happened. The government at that time bent to a lynch mob of public will and executed a guy who wasn’t guilty of any legally defined crime. That government created a situation that transformed the world and led to the demise of their own country and affected the entire world for ages to come.

We certainly can learn from history.
While our biological drives haven’t changed or evolved, our learning and culture has. We can choose to remember and not repeat the past. We can choose to forgive those who came before and remember what came before so we don’t repeat it. But we have to CHOOSE to not repeat it.

Think about this. Look at this guy’s theory on if one elderly person alive touched and transferred their wisdom to a younger person before they died. Follow the chain of people backwards in time. Time is much smaller than you think.
13 Generations

Francis Ford Coppola Claret

Just popped a cork on some Francis Ford Coppola Claret, the black label bottle with the gold wire wrapping. YUM! I love this stuff. When I’m looking for a smooth robust red just for sipping. Or to pair with some tenderloin with some of my homemade passilla chipotle steak rub. I’m getting yearnings for meat and wine right now just thinking about it.

Whine on the Porch

Whine on the porch is about… wine on the porch! Big old south Texas homes generally have a porch of some kind. You can tell a lot about the people who built that home. Homes built by people who are friendly and like to have friends over have bigger deeper friendlier porches. This blog is about what we talk about on the porch with friends over a glass or two of fine wine. Something magical happens on a porch with fine company and wine in hand.

Wine on the porch is about whine on the porch and about solving our town’s and our country’s problems. It’s about open discussion and freedom of speech and fine wine. Sometimes we even eat cheese or make wine! But most of all we talk.

[Republished from my original blog Whine on the Porch]

Making Gurwustraminer Vino

So, the French Cab I made in the spring has turned out absolutely fantastic. My wino friends say it is every bit as good as a 50 buck bottle at a nice restaurant.

With that success under my belt… Thought I’d try a white…

So here I am… I started this batch back in hmmm maybe June… I put the juice in the bucket, added the yeast, added elderberry dried blossoms, and measured specific gravity and all that.

Around the first week of September, I transferred the wine from the fermenter to a glass carboy. Tried to not get the gooky yeast paste from the bottom, and tried to not get the floaty flower blossoms. A bit of sludge and a few blossoms made it through the siphon , but no big deal breaker there, not enough to let it settle and do it again. Plan was in about 10 days to check the specific gravity daily and when it stopped changing, to clear the wine. Yeah!

Then… I forgot about it… As in really forgot about it. This morning Morning, the 29th of October… 8 weeks plus later, I went into the bathroom we never use… And saw my vino…. I’m not sure how 8 days tuned into 8 weeks… But it did.

So today is the day we add isinglass to clear the wine. Awhile back I bought this really cool wine whip gadget that you use on an electric drill. Last time I used it… Well I didn’t follow the shopkeepers instruction of go slow…

when using a wine whip….

Go slow longer then you need to, cause once the wine starts spinning… The CO2 will come out in a rush… After the initial offgassing, you can speed it up.

And, I found out that wine shop guys do know what they are talking about… oh boy, will it ever rush out. As a result of my first whipping attempt last January, I am now the proud owner of a designated wine making T-shirt complete with Custom Cabernet modern art splotches all over it.

Not wanting to add to my custom wine art tshirt collection, this time I drilled my whip slow, and slow… And slow… Then faster…faster… Nothing, no rush of gas… Just the wine is staring to look cloudy and muddy. Oh gosh, what did i screw up? I thought this was “clearing the wine”. I check my directions, check the Internet and call my store guy expert. Turns out that I’d left the wine sitting so long that it had off-gassed by itself. And the cloudiness is great and desirable at this point. The isenglass needs those old yeast particles floating around in order to make the tinier floaties bind to the big globs to make even heavier bigger blobby clumps which will soon sink to the bottom. This is how you get the wine really clear. Or, the wine guy suggested that I could buy a mechanical filter and skip the clearing. It only costs… (didn’t hear this part as I was admiring his ability to smoothly cross-sell and musing about having him train my shop employees on that very great and little understood art form.)

So I’ve whipped, isenglassed, and put the carboy back into the never used bathroom to sit for yet another indeterminant amount of time, before I rack it… I wonder if I’ll be able to give bottles away for Christmas?

[Republished with permission from myself, from Wine on the Porch, Oct 29, 2011]