found object wine

Last night I bottled my first batch of wine: while I've helped Marc with the previous batches of crazy, this was the first I've done all by myself. Aww!

When I was visiting my parents' house last week my grandmother came over and borrowed my child while I made dinner, fed him lots of cookies, and brought him back with a bucket of figs from her sister's tree. I finally got the whole mess through the food mill's finest grind, separated into chunky-mess-for-preserves and thin-mess-for-wine.

The stuff was light brown and about the texture of pudding, so I added sugar 'till it was sweet and water 'till it was thin, and set it in my largest pot on the back burner 'till it was cooked (yeah, we're real precise around here).

The chunky mess went into a smaller pot with proportionally more sugar and much less water, a few shakes of cinnamon and powdered ginger and a drop of molasses, and let's call the resulting three jars of glop Fig Butter 'cause it's nice on toast (toast being that stupid-good oversweetened wonderful bread that Marc bakes 'cause my huffy pretentious "artisan hearth breads" take too damn long for a busy day).

When the doctored fig juice on the back burner had hung out for a while, I ladled it into a gallon glass jug (a stash of which we found in the chicken house/junk pile on my family's property, and LAWD I am thrilled to be mucking around in it for furnishings and whatnot like I've wanted to do since I was nine), added cold water 'till it was cooler and full enough. It was about body temperature, the kind of warmth you want on your wrist for bathing a newborn, and the kind of warmth yeastie-monsters adore. So I poured a coffee mug half full of the stuff, stirred in a packet of yeast what's been floating around in my cabinets neglected in favor of the jar in the fridge, and let it proof.

Shit foamed up boy-howdy fast, was poured back into the jug, sloshed around a bit, and we Ooh-ed and Aah-ed like the tiny happy bubbles were fireworks, topped it with a vapor lock, set it thus contented atop the fridge.

We racked (that's siphoning it out to dump the yeasts collected fallen at the bottom of the jug) and tasted the bottle of blackberry and jug of apple peach, and darned if they don't remind me of a cheap dry red wine and an oversweet white. I'm darn pleased.