Adventures in Wine-Making, Day Eight

Actually, day eight is the same as days four through seven or so. It's not supposed to be, but it is. Because when you go to sterilize a carboy to decant the mess into, you realize that all the carboys in the house are full of old, other wines that Johnny made and never got around to bottling.

You may have written about this in a post somewhere before.

So before you can do your eighth-day-ish things, you have to get all of the other everythings out of all the other carboys, figure out what-all they are and whether or not you'll still dare to drink them (yes, yes, no, oh hell no), then bottle the keeper stuff and dump the rest (that third one turns out to be a very effective windowsill trap for the fruit flies that have been hovering over the airlock on the concord wine) and then sterilize all the gear (sterilize the living daylights out of that last one) before using any of it again.

This takes all day. Which is exactly the reason that it has never been done. Because these are all Johnny's projects, and Johnny sometimes has a little trouble finishing things he starts. Witness your kitchen. Johnny, in fact, is starting to suspect that this Concord Grape Wine experiment may be something you cooked up solely to force him to deal with all of those old wines and bottles. It is not. You only wish you were that clever. If you had been, you would have thought of it the first time you got grapes off those vines. In 2005.

So anyway, day eight seems to have come and gone and you're still standing here squeezing the bag.

Ah, hell, what's one more day, specific-gravitationally-speaking?



(Muskego Jeff suggests we invest in a hydrometer if we're going to keep this homebrew business up. THAT'S the word! The thing you use to measure the specific gravity. I don't know, though. I'm still not sure I even believe in this "specific gravity." Let alone "hydrometers." I mean, gravity, in my experience, has always been pretty freakin' general. "Down" more or less covers it. Right, Val?)