Tasting Notes

Today was a day of wine tasting like no other. Fermentation has finished for all of our experiments, so we 'racked' them into clean, sterilised demijohns and dropped in a crushed campden tablet into each to kill any lingering yeast. We sealed each with a clean airlock, to ensure no lingering fermentation. I'll replace these with a bung in a couple of days.

Tasting notes:

Rosie: Strawberry

Started 2 July 2020

Beautiful, rich, crystal clear colour, like boiled sweets. Definitely strawberry in bouquet and flavour. Needs to mature and lose some of the yeasty headiness. A little too acid.  

We sweetened it with 200g sugar. I'm hoping a few months left alone will mellow it.

Summary: boozy strawberry sours from an unpleasant little boy's grimy coat pocket.

Betty: Blackcurrant.

Started 4 August 2020

Deep, clear, maroon in colour. Strong the blackcurrant in this one is. Very dry and tannic. 

Decided not to sweeten this until I've tried neutralising some of the acidity. 

Summary: Distillation of woodland berries passed through a brown bear with a urinary tract infection.

Bumpkin: Rhubarb

Started 2 June 2020

OMG ACID. Crystal clear and bright yellow. There is little of the rhubarb here but the malic acid. There is a lingering afterburn to the acidity. The mouth feel is pleasant, coming I expect from the grape concentrate. This needs popping away in a cupboard for a year at least. We should experiment with acidity reducing something-or-other.

Summary: Doctor Frankenstein's other hobby.  

Bertie: Rhubarb

Started 2 June 2020

Even more acid!! Very unpleasant. No amount of sugar can kill the sharpness. The back of my nose feels like the overstretched neck of a tied-off weather balloon. Bertie was started from the same must as Bumpkin, and the only difference was a sneak tasting some months back. So Bumpkin may have had chance to oxidise a little, given some air.

Summary: Something unexplained from the back of Dr Jekyll's fume cupboard.

I'm dreading the next tasting.

After the Storm

 

First Catch Your Beetroot

This is not a recipe for pickled beetroot. This is an experiment in making pickled beetroot based on a recipe for pickled beetroot.

First catch your beetroot

Washed, topped and tailed, we had about a kilo.

We simmered this very gently for an hour.

Meanwhile, we toasted about 4tsp of mixed pickling spice.

We added a mixture of red wine vinegar and pickling vinegar, because that's what we had. Total 700mg. Both have the 6% strength, which is necessary to preserve the beetroot.

We peeled the hot roots over a bowl of cold water - to make them handleable.

Then chopped the beetroot small enough to fit the jars. The jars and lids were washed and sterilised in a 'cool' oven. We filled the jars, leaving a space so that all the veg will be covered in vinegar and still with enough room for an air gap. Then we added a teaspoon of rocksalt.

Finally we filled the jars with the hot spiced vinegar and screwed the lids on.

The lids are of the 'tamper proof' type, that pop reassuringly to a concave shape as the jars cool.

Now we have to leave them alone for a couple of weeks.

Then eat.

If it tastes okay, put labels on and call it a recipe.

Remembrance

Unbelievably, a year has passed since Pippy died.  

What is one to do?  The World keeps its orbit, seasons turn, and we have little choice but to turn with it, too.  Strangely, air still enters my lungs, blood still pumps around my body, and the mundanity of ordinary existence pushes us along, as unstoppable as the whole spinning World.  All I can do is mark the passing of time after time has stopped.  

So, anniversaries, significant, trivial, public and private, are marked.  I trundle on, like a midnight workman laying traffic cones from the back of a slow-moving lorry.  I drop another cone and watch it recede, my back to the future.  

A year of cones is in view and each one is distinct, for the time-being: our first Christmas without her, her birthday come and gone, our wedding day photos reviewed again, familiar, put away, but now infinitely precious.  Maybe habit will inure me, but I doubt it. And I know, for as long as my truck rolls on, there will always be new cones to drop.

Appearances

My neighbour, Bridget, loves this time of year, when the leaves start to turn: all those autumn colours.  But when John Keats spoke of 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun, 

I don't think he was contemplating his rhubarb patch.  I mean, face it: have you ever seen such a flat and depressing sight in a garden?

I took this picture on Saturday 17 October, as the anniversary of Pippy's death drew close.  Feeling flat already, I didn't need this.  The veg plot looks like it has given up.  Which indeed it has, in a manner of thinking; the season of growth is over.  

But I must remind myself that appearances are deceptive.  According to one neighbour (who is old enough to know) the rhubarb patch is over sixty years old.  Really, it's just resting, drawing it's energy into the succulent roots.  Until the days grow warm again, it bides its time. As I must do, we all must do.  Who would have thought that there is wisdom in a flacid rhubarb plant?

And still, I got a few apples from the Cox tree (for non-natives, this is a variety called Cox's orange pippin. It's sweet and sharp - like an orange. A pippin is an apple grown from a pip.)

I made a pie.

The skin is often scabby and mottled, but, like these were, beautiful inside.  Nature's admonishment to shallow people, ha ha.

Oh, alright then, John. Lift us up.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

    For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

  Steady thy laden head across a brook;

  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

  Among the river sallows, borne aloft

    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Kippered

I kipperized the neighbourhood this afternoon by burning the last bits of the old shed.  Seemed like a good idea at the time...

...but it got very smoky with all that semi-rotten wet wood.

Restituted Rockery

Much overgrown lemon balm and chameleon plant removed, replanted with heather, variegated ajuga, and bits and bobs, including herbs from various pots, using my traditional planting technique of 'push it in and see what grows'.

The last photo in particular is not very prepossessing, but just you wait!