Art, music, wine making.....not just another weekend in Hope. (updated)

Yes, yes, yes.  I am posting on my blog.  Last weekend was filled with fun events.  On Saturday Ann and I went to the Scotchman Peak's Plein Air workshop at the Outskirts Gallery and Marketplace.

 I can't say that I am an artist.  I do have watercolors and I have attempted to paint, but not very successfully.  I will say that I was encouraged to try it again after listening to the last artist speak and paint, Gregg Caudell.

This painting of his is titled, "Big Rock Candy Mountain".  How many times have we sung that song at our sing-a-longs?

"One evening as the sun went down......"

 ......and the jungle fires were burning."


He is a plein air artist.  It seems like it would be a wonderful way to enjoy the view and to try to capture the moment.

High Pasture

This one is, "Riders in the Sky".  Another song favorite at the sing-a-longs.

His painting technique was unbelievable.  It was so interesting to watch him paint and I loved all of his suggestions for a beginning artist.  I highly recommend taking the time to check out his artwork at Fine Art America.  He also has a blog.

I wonder if he has painted "The House of the Rising Sun".  If he has, I'd better start saving my $$.

The next day, I went back to the Outskirts to play some music with Bruce Bishop and Drew Brown.  It was a first time event for me playing with two very talented musicians.  It was another magical afternoon.  (Thank you to Paul for the photo and Vera for sending it to me.  It was a milestone event for me.)

Notice how serious I look?  That's because I am doing everything I can to keep up with those two!

photo from Outskirts website

On Monday, it was back to reality as it was time to start our 2015 wine.  It takes most of the day as there's a lot of sterilizing each step of the way, but the wine is in the vats and the little yeasties are already working away this morning.

The wine will be in the vats for about ten days, then we will rack it off into 5 gallon glass carboys.  The wine will age in the carboys until bottling time.  It takes about six months for the white wine and a year for the red.   Patience is required.

April Dawn from 2011

.....down the tracks came a hobo hiking, he said folks I'm not turning.  I'm headed for a land that's far away, beside the crystal fountains.  So come with me, we go and see, the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

A Wine First for 2015.

This will be the first year that we had enough ripe green grapes to make an entire carboy of white wine.  

It's almost time to bottle the white.  

All three wines have cleared very nicely.  I won't need to add any fining agents this year.  

Both red wines are aging well.  They are still a bit acidic, but they have 6 more months to age before bottling time.

To bake or not to bake? That is the question.

My Christmas presents from Retired Mountain Man arrived early.   A new Gibson acoustic guitar and a new apron.  They are both beautiful gifts.

Maybe you can help me answer the question.  Should I bake Christmas cookies or play the guitar?

 I am going to have a glass of my 2014 white wine while I ponder the question.  I used the wine thief to siphon some out of the carboy to test it for the first time yesterday.  It is starting to taste good and is already clearing.  The two red wines are still quite cloudy and more acidic.  It always takes more time for the red wine.

Hmm.

As for Christmas morning, I plan to serenade Retired Mountain Man with my rendition of "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer".  It's Karma you know.  The gift that keeps on coming back to you.

I've reached the end!

I am finally finished.  Done!  Kaput!   It's over!  I don't want to do anymore of it.

The 2014 canning, freezing and preserving season is over.  

The tally:  

7 jars of Pear Maraschino Jam

9 jars of Chai Spicy Plum Jam with Hazelnuts

9 jars of Chai Spicy Plum Jam with Pecans

12 pints of grape jelly

8  jars of white grape jelly

7 jars of huckleberry jelly

3 gallons of plum liqueur

2 gallons of Slivovitz  (plum brandy)

8 quarts of dill pickles

16 jars of hot peppers

52 pints of salsa

6 quarts of dilly beans

12 pints of freezer broccoli

6 pints of cauliflower

15 pints of sweet corn

6 pints of beets

1 gallon of jalapeno peppers

1 gallon bag of ancho peppers

2 gallon bags of green bell peppers

2 quarts of roasted tomatoes

4 containers of tomato soup base

15 pounds of carrots in the crisper

37 onions hung up in the root cellar

5 pounds of shallots stored in the pantry

2 dryers of Oyster Mushrooms

And last but not least, the wine is started and fermenting in the vats.  

Cheers!

2014 will turn out to be a great wine.

The red wine in the vat with the wine yeasties working away.  Our 2014 wine is on its way.

Thank you grape arbor.

Why we have two refrigerators.

Almost ten gallons of grape juice, including 2 gallons of white grape juice waiting to be made into Burkhart Wine.  

In honor of National Pomegranate Month....

At out band practice last night, our Little Drummer Girl, Julie, brought all of the ingredients for this cocktail.   We thoroughly enjoyed it although it was fortunate that we drank it after we practiced, as the alcohol content seemed very high.  The recipe might have called for a little more alcohol than necessary.

Pomegranate Cosmopolitan

Note: To make this as an individual cocktail, divide the quantities by 6 and chill in a cocktail shaker, strain, and pour.

EASE OF PREPARATION: A snap

Makes 6 cocktails

POMEGRANATE COSMOS

2/3 cup cup pomegranate (or cranberry) juice

16 ounces (2 cups) premium organic vodka, like Washington’s Dry Fly

4 ounces fresh lime juice

4 ounces Cointreau liqueur

GARNISH

Lime wheels,pomegranate seeds and/or raspberries

Pour the pomegranate juice into an ice cube tray and freeze.

Combine the vodka, lime juice, and Cointreau in a large bowl. Add 2 to 3 cups of ice and stir briefly to chill (5 to 10 seconds). Strain into a pretty, clear pitcher. Chill for at least half an hour. Chill 6 martini glasses.

TO SERVE

If you are going to serve everyone immediately, put 1 or 2 pomegranate ice cubes in the bottom of each glass and pour the vodka blend over it. If you want this to sit out on the buffet for a few minutes, add the pomegranate cubes to the pitcher and allow guests to serve themselves in the chilled, garnished glasses. 

Garnish each glass with a wheel of sliced lime, pomegranate seeds or raspberries.

They were delicious and beautiful!

We (all of the gals) enjoyed a lively conversation about which actor was the most  good looking, attractive, sexy, etc...
Robert Redford, ( Navy whites in the Way We Were), George Clooney, Gary Cooper, Tom Cruise......(nah, not Tom Cruise).

Hope Mountain Blues Wine

It just seemed right to have a Cougar Creek Blues Wine and a Hope Mountain Blues Wine.

The final carboy in the bottles.

One more item crossed off my To Do List. A very big item....

which has needed to be done for several months.  It's no small task, since it requires about 100 clean wine bottles.   The old labels and shrink wrap have to be soaked and removed with a knife.  Then all of the bottles have to be cleaned and sterilized.


The siphon and all equipment must be sterilized between each step of the process.

I soak my corks in boiling water so that they are easier to insert.  Next I apply the shrink wrap and then finally the labels.  Each carboy of wine usually tastes a little different so I create an individual label for each carboy of wine.

I started this process at 10:00 a.m. and finished it at 6:30 p.m.   

I am not making any wine this year.  You can see why.

I will bottle carboy #4 today.

It's almost time to do a final wine tasting.

That would be for this year's white wine.  I will be checking it soon and do the final racking before we bottle it around April 1st.

April Dawn 2011

I am not a grape wine purist.  In other words, I am quite fond of white wines made with additional fruit.   At least half of my wine juice includes grapes, but I really like adding pear, apple, peach or plum to the grapes to get a unique taste.  It makes a very nice, crisp light dry wine.    The 2011 April Dawn white wine was quite tasty.   The 2013 will be in the bottle soon.

No Whining!

I love Tuesdays.  Tuesdays are my guitar lesson days and the lesson is sooo much fun with my instructor, Doug Bond.  It's even more fun because I take the lesson with my friends, Ann and Ellie,  the Mandolin Gals. We play our instruments, try to sing along at the same time, (very difficult for me) and laugh at ourselves a lot!

There's one thing about Tuesdays that I don't love -  the errands which are always attached to lesson day.  Yesterday, it was "take the snow tires off the car" day, and after waiting for five hours at the tire center, it also included buying new tires for the Outback.  Ouch! Painful price tag!  Yes, I know.  A necessity, but I would much rather spend the money on a new keyboard or a guitar or a vacation weekend......   Not a necessity.

On the other hand, a flat tire is a major inconvenience.    

Please, no more whining!

Except....

At the end of the day I did finish the labeling and the shrink-wrap for 54 bottles of wine.  These bottles are ready to be moved to the wine cellar. 

It's in the bottle!

We started the wine bottling yesterday and have two carboys of wine in the bottles ready for labels and shrink-wrap.  

Bottles cleaned with sterilizer solution

This handy gadget makes sterilizing the bottles easier.

You need one of these in the bottle as you siphon the wine.

Everything is sterilized in the solution at each step.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elderberry

Apple/Pear

Another cutting of lettuce before I move the plants outside.

"Making wine is like having children, you love them all, but oh yes, they are different." Bunny Finkelstein, Judd Hill Winery

The time has come.  The final wine tasting was today and the judgment is that all three carboys are ready for the bottle.  This year we have an elderberry wine,  a peach/pear wine and an apple/pear wine.   They were started last fall  (October 2011 Wine Making)  and have been in cold storage for the last 5 months. 

The peach/pear wine has a beautiful color and dry fruit flavors.  The elderberry has a very rich berry flavor and a dark burgundy color..  The apple/pear has a beautiful clear straw color and a light dry crisp taste.  All three are very drinkable wines. 

I finished removing the labels and washing the last 25 bottles and now have 75 clean wine bottles ready to go.  I added the ingredients to stop any possible  fermentation which means we should be ready to bottle in a couple of days. 

Cougar Creek Winery 2012 Preview

Today, the plan is to rack the three carboys of wine.  "Racking" is siphoning the wine from one carboy into another.  It helps clear the wine as there are usually tiny acid crystals or other sediments in the bottom of the carboy.  At each step all the equipment must be sterilized with potassium metabisulfite.  The process isn't too bad once I get started.

 

Of course there must be taste tests of each carboy.  I am hoping that my elderberry wine tastes better this year.  I used more juice this year and very little water.  After the wines are racked into clean carboys, they will be moved to cold storage for the winter.  The colder temperature also helps remove the acidity as the wine ages.  With some luck we will have our 2012 Cougar Creek Pear Nouveau on New Year's Eve.

Ruby Red and Classic Concord Blend

The wine labels are on the bottles and we are moving them to our wine cellar.

A Dry, Medium Ruby Red Wine

Yesterday, Retired Mountain Man and I bottled the last two carboys of wine from last year's crop.  One carboy was the Burkhart Concord Grape and the other is Elderberry, Dark Cherry and Concord Grape.
 Both wines are dry, medium reds. 

Today I added the shrink-wrap and tomorrow I will create the labels and print them.

I spent the rest of the day giving the two dogs a bath.  Tomorrow is grooming day and a trip to the vet.
Here we have two wet dogs drying out and taking a nap.  Life is good but it smells like wet dogs.

Strawberry Wine, Watermelon Wine, Elderberry Wine....

 The berries

And the wine in the making

If life gives you lemons......

Or, if you have pears instead of grapes, then you make pear wine.  There are no grapes again this year.

I started the first vat on Monday.  It is pears, peaches and white grapes.   I wish you could smell the aroma of the yeast working on all that sugar.  The aroma fills the whole house.   I have never made wine with peaches but I think it will add a very nice flavor to the wine. 

Yesterday I spent the day steaming the pears from Uncle Jack's place.  How did we pick them?  The easy way.  Jon had Phil drive his Kubota tractor to the orchard and he got in the bucket of the tractor.  He picked three boxes in about 45 minutes.   The pear juice is really sweet and has great flavor.  I have made pear/grape wine the last two years and it turns out to be a very delicate dry white wine.  Very nice.

I plan to start this batch of wine this afternoon.  It will be pears and white grapes. Tomorrow I plan to strip the elderberries from the stems, steam them to get the juice and start the elderberry wine.   I also have a gallon of plum juice that a friend gave me and I think it will be a perfect addition to the elderberry wine.

It takes six months to make a nice dry white wine.  Next April this wine should be ready to bottle and hopefully look something like this.....

See the USA, in your Chevrolet!

We are getting ready to drive all the way down Cougar Creek Road to Alan's pond where we will pick elderberries.  We are going to drive our 1971 Chevy truck.  It's brakes are questionable, so it will make it a bit of an adventure.  Just in case you don't know, Cougar Creek Road is not a maintained county road and it's a bit steep in places as it follows the creek down the mountain.  The truck is necessary as we need to stand a ladder in the back of the truck to get at the elderberries.  

I should also mention that this truck is older than our youngest son, Dave.  Dave is also still going strong, but... may have some age issues too.

We love our truck. 

We bought it in 1974 right after we moved into the Loman cabin on Spring Creek Hill.  We were so proud of it as it was 4x4 truck and back in those days most people did not have the luxury of a four-wheel drive pickup.  In the winter there was lots of snow and Spring Creek Road was steep. You either chained-up your truck or car, drove a four-wheel drive, or you walked home.  Just above the turn into our driveway was the infamous S curve!  It was the steepest part of the road.  In the winter there were many times when chains or a 4x4 would not get you up the S curve.   Ok, Ok, back to what we are doing today. 

Chevy trucks, the heartbeat of America, that's today's Chevrolet!

This picture is blurry because there is no way I could hold the camera steady enough for the shot.  We did stop here - at the top of the hill - to do a brake test  to see if we actually can stop!   once we start down the hill.  

I should have taken the photo then.  

The windshield has several large cracks in it which made it even more difficult to take photos.  I don't know why the piece of firewood is on the dashboard.  I was afraid to ask.  Maybe to block the heat from the heater which is pouring out full blast and can't be turned off.  

Yes, I had my window down.  It's sunny and it's 71 degrees. 

Unfortunately,the window will only roll down halfway now.  

"No, we do not need a newer truck!"

Ok, back to the elderberry picking adventure.... Here we go headed down the hill.

We had to stop here and get this tree out of the road.

There just happened to be a pile of fresh bear scat in the road.  Lucky for us the bear had been eating apples not elderberries. 

And now the steep part....

Be ready to open your door and jump.....  just in case there's a brake failure.

Oh yeah, sure.

Well of course we made it.  We picked 25 pounds of elderberries and drove back up the hill.  More on the elderberry winemaking later.

Chevy trucks!  Like a rock!