Adventures in Wine-Making, Step Two

Ha ha! I fooled you! We're still on Step One! Step One takes a long time!

That's because nobody involved can stand the thought of maybe, possibly, putting their hand in the bucket for a grape and coming up with an earwig, so somebody came up with the novel idea of putting the grapes in the sink and covering them with water and watching the earwigs float to the top, flail about, scream tiny little dying-earwig screams, and drown. But it takes a long time for them to give up the creepy ghost, and while they're getting on with it some of them actually try to crawl out of the sink, so you have to rub the edges of it with oil first sop they can't get a foothold, because who wants to be the one to try to squash an earwig with a wad of toilet paper and have it get all soggy so the nasty thing can pinch his nasty little pinchers through and actually touch you with them? Not me!

Another reason it takes a while is can you only fit so many grapes in the sink at one time, so the earwig-drowning must be done in several stages. And every time you accidentally lay eyes on a living earwig, you have to scream and do the heeby-jeeby dance and take off all your clothes and give yourself a steaming Silkwood shower. Plus once they are dead -- once they're all ex-earwigs, as it were -- you realize that the grapes are in the kitchen sink, a-doy, so there's no way for you to run the demised bastards down the garbage disposal, which is what you usually do in this sort of creepy-crawly situation. Well, either that, or you wad them up in toilet paper and flush them down the loo, but someone is afraid of earwigs squirming back up the bog hole and pinching him on his dainty little nutsack.

So you have to scoop them out of the water-and-grape-filled kitchen sink with a paper cup (which you'll then burn) -- because who wants to stick their hand in a sink full of grapes and water with a bunch of what-if-they're-not-really-dead earwigs in there? Right! Not me again! -- and collect them in the mop bucket, then dump a whole mess of bleach in on top of them, just to be sure. And you have to repeat this whole process about seven times (although it would be nice if, just once, you remembered to use the other sink. Der!), and when you're done, that whole bucket o' earwigs-'n'-bleach goes straight down the disposal with the hottest water you can get out of the tap and a giggle of maniacal glee.

I don't think you'll be too upset (or surprised) to learn that I didn't take any pictures as this process was going on. So instead I'll show you a grocery list I found when I was retrieving notes from my notebook on Saturday. I don't remember writing it, but...

... it must have been one hell of a drink!