My wife has started a new (side) work venture, as a marketing consultant for The Traveling Vinyard. Bringing wine tastings into peoples homes. Think Pampered Chef or Tupperware home parties. She already has two parties under her belt, and several more in the upcoming weeks. Great fun.
We’ve received enough cases of wine that the good folks over at UPS know who I am (and I don’t need to flash an ID to prove I’m over 21. (Like there’s any question about that!)
One upshot of sampling all these wines, I’ve learned that the same grape can yield a dramatically different wine in the hands of another winemaker, or in another part of the world – even if right next door – so everything I thought I knew about what I like and what I definately don’t like, has been a real eye, nose and mind opening experience!
Plus, in the past couple weeks I’ve moved a couple steps closer to joining the Wine Century Club. Happily, I still have quite a ways to go to complete my “membership.”
Starting in 2000, I’m 28% of the way there – average supermarket offerings, plus some regional varieties from NH, NY and CA… Cannot confirm what I’ve previously had in France ‘93 or ‘98 or Napa/Sonoma ‘99, so I’ll just have to have some of those again!
I love the smell of bread baking, and I love the smell of bottling beer. Tonight I had plenty of the latter. Two kegs, 4 gallons of beer in the making, yielding 14 quarts of premium brew. How do I know it’s premium? It says so on the box!
Tonight I opened the second to last bottle of porter – even better than I remember (Which also answered a question I pondered in my previous beer post… the unlabled beer was not the porter, but was it the apple? (ah, a new question to raise a glass to). I do hope that was the apple, for otherwiseI’ll have to cook with the several quarts remaining – is there anything beyond beer can chicken or brats? I’ve used 1/2 a can in a batch of crepes, but this would be enough crepes to turn off a Frenchman.
Time indeed is an essential ingredient – one not listed in the basic instructions with my kit. Two weeks from keg to bottle to glass indeed! Ok, two weeks is certainly possible, and still a better result than most of what I’d find in the supermarket. But with a little more patience… I may never order a beer at a restaurant again. Seriously.
There was one recipe I recall that called for 6 months of hanging out in the bottles before cracking them open… While I struggle with the patience to wait out my two latest creations (for a few weeks), my mind turns to the summer possibilites. There were some recipes I’d made a mental note to make, now to find those before I run out of summer to enjoy them.
