At Long Last, Bottled Pinot!

This Sunday afternoon, I finally took the plunge and bottled my Pinot Noir. It was a bright, sunny day, so the photos are particularly nice.



The first step was to wash and sanitize all the bottles. I did so with Iodophor, an iodine-based sanitizer, and hung them on the same bottle tree that I used for beer way back when. Isn't it pretty?



Next came the actual filling and corking. I was lucky: the filling wand from my beer days left exactly the right amount of ullage in the bottle to contain the air compressed under the cork.

It was also my first time using the corker. It's a medieval-looking thing, but all it does is compress the cork in a metal iris and then slide it into the bottle. It's all about mechanical advantage!

For more of the story, check out this week's WineFix podcast, which I anticipate will be released tomorrow (Wednesday) evening.

-Rich

Wine Table Shot

Wine table shot.

This is a much better picture (click it for a larger version) of the wine table Leslie got me for Christmas.

Isn't it beautiful?

-Rich

WineFix Number 1 Posted!

Just letting you know that my first-ever podcast has been posted at WineFix.net. :-)

Exciting!

-Rich

[UPDATE: Seems not everyone can see the new site! Please use echoloc8.libsyn.com if you have trouble, and please let me know if you can't reach either address.]

Introducing WineFix!

This may sound like it's come out of left field to most readers here, but the more I learned about podcasting (see the previous post), the more I became intrigued by the idea of spouting off in audio form about all things wine-related.

One thing led to another: a tutorial was read, my meager collection of audio equipment was perused, podcast after podcast was downloaded and listened to (mainly from graperadio.com and winecast.net), and ideas began to congeal and combine in my busy little noggin.

This all precipitated the registering of the www.winefix.net domain, the eventual discovery of good podcast-hosting space over at Liberated Syndication (www.libsyn.com), and the grabbing of the comment line number 1-206-339-WINE for people to call in and comment about posts I've made there, or about whatever might be crossing their minds. :-)

As of right now I haven't posted any actual audio, but I plan to record tomorrow sometime, and depending whether I can get everything all equalized and finalized I'll probably be posting and making a note here as well.

So what does this mean for Brain Squeezings? Well, I will certainly continue to post here. I doubt I'm going to have the free time for more than one podcast per week (though time will tell), but for wine-related posts I may well wind up making intra-podcast posts over at WineFix.

Stay tuned!

-Rich

Late to the Party: Podcasting and Me

Podcasting. For those who may not have heard of it, a podcast is a compressed sound file that a person has put online for download via an RSS reader.

(If you don't know what RSS is about, here's a precis: an RSS feed is an XML file that one puts online to advertise to the world that you have things [usually news stories or blog posts, or, lately, podcasts] that they might like to download. An RSS reader is a program (which might operate as the basis for a site like Bloglines.com, or might run on one's desktop) which allows a person to "subscribe" to RSS feeds that he or she wants to keep track of, and which highlights new items that might have appeared in an updated feed. Brain Squeezings has its own RSS feed [which happens to be in Atom format, but that's not important], if you want to subscribe. RSS feeds are an incredibly efficient way to keep on top of news sources--I keep track of something like 25 feeds every day, on subjects from friends' blogs to tech news to wine reviews.)

...But this post is about podcasts. It's possible to link to an external file (called an enclosure) with a RSS feed entry, and if that enclosure is an audio file like an MP3, then you have a podcast. It's that simple. (The "pod" in podcast, by the way, comes from "iPod," currently the most popular player for compressed sound files, though anyone with iTunes [free] or Windows Media Player [also free, with Windows] can listen on their computer.)

Most people create podcasts in order to host their own music or talk-radio shows (responsible podcasters pay a fee to ASCAP and whomever else in order to play copyrighted music), or simply to have a blog that their readers can listen to. I finally got hooked on podcasts by grabbing the first eight episodes of Grape Radio, which is a trio of guys who just talk about wine. They frequently have guests on their show, and it's a well-produced bit of work, complete with bumper music and reading of credits at the end.

But podcasts aren't necessarily just for audioblogs and net-cast radio shows: it's not hard to envision a means wherein one's telephone messages are published for your perusal by your phone-service provider on a secure feed, or wherein radio shows publish popular "back-issues" of shows as podcasts (which, I understand, some shows are beginning to do), or indeed any audio information can be made available, TiVo-like, to anyone who wants it.

Here's the kicker: podcasts, as a concept, have only been around since September-ish of last year, and a Google search on 'podcast' yields around 1,790,000 hits as of this writing. This could be big...

Links
One story of how podcasting started
A very thorough definition of 'podcast'
NYT on Podcasting (requires a free registration)
Mac Howto
Other documentation

-Rich

Wine Glass Rack

Wine Glass Rack.

I got a wild hair today, and decided to vacuum, shampoo my carpet, do the dishes and (finally!) hang the wine glass rack that I brought here from Richmond.

This is a moodily lit photo, I admit, but with the blinds open the glasses were actually harder to see.

Aren't wine glasses purty?

I have to work this afternoon, so I'll just have to get to stabilizing and clarifying the Pinot tomorrow sometime.

-Rich

Coming This Weekend: Stabilization of the Pinot

This Saturday will be the Appointed Time to "stabilize" the Pinot I've been fermenting. I'll be stirring a quantity of sulfites (potassium metabisulfite, if I'm not mistaken) into the infant wine to "stabilize" or stop the fermentation by (mostly) killing the yeast. In addition, I'll be adding a gelatin mixture and some dry clay called bentonite to "clarify" the wine, thus causing undesirable compounds (that would make it cloudy and/or taste odd) to precipitate out onto the yeast detritus on the bottom of the carboy.

One of the things that I've been fascinated with about the winemaking process is that it's a much more clinical and, well, synthetic-feeling process than brewing beer was. Certainly, brewing incorporates all manner of complicated measures like temperature regulation to maximize the action of certain enzymes in the mash, and siphoning and sparging methods to get the sugar-extraction job done, but that always felt somehow biological and mystical to me, more than chemical and logical, which is the impression winemaking gives so far. The difference is mostly semantics, I know, but making wine has been much more of a predictable, dump-it-into-a-container-and-add-stuff process than beer's bubble-bubble-toil-and-trouble ever was.

I know that the yeast is transforming the grape juice just as much as it did the barley brew, but winemaking seems a more clinical and exact thing than brewing. Not that I'm complaining, of course: beermaking involves making an elaborately-seasoned malt sugar solution called wort (which happens to be one of the most biologically "available" media you can make in the home) and then getting only the microorganisms you choose to flourish, and no others.

The central difference where wine is concerned is that wine "must" (prepared grape juice, pre-yeast-introduction) is inherently fairly acidic, and therefore inhospitable to many of the nasty-tasting microbes that love to mix things up in beer. Not that wine is idiot-proof: there are many nasties that can compete with the several flavors of Saccharomyces that one introduces to get fermenting done, but far fewer than in beer, and by judicious use of sulfites in wine, one can make a must that is very well suited only to the yeast you like.

Anyway, it's reassuring to know that the process is so well understood (given the several millennia of crushing experience the human species has amassed): winemaking books read more like formulae than do beer brewing's recipes. Might this be due to wine traditionally being more of a luxury product, and thus more likely to receive research attention? Possibly; I'll look into it.

-Rich