Free Wine!

It’s the one-year anniversary of the launch of this blog and I decided to celebrate it with a new look, new content, and most importantly, my first annual Dry Run Winery giveaway.  So here’s what you have to do to enter:

1)      Make a comment on this blog

2)      Subscribe to or become a follower of this blog

3)      Become a follower of mine on Twitter

4)      Mention me in a tweet with a link to the blog

5)      Retweet my most recent tweet

6)      Comment on my most recent posting on Facebook

7)      Mention me on your Facebook status with a link to the blog

You can earn one entry per category for the random drawing, which means if you do all seven you will have seven entries and improved chances to win!  And don’t worry about your efforts attracting more competitors to the blog, the more entries I receive the more wine I will give away.  Does all this sound like a shameless attempt at self-promotion?  That’s because it is.  After a year of writing this stuff, it’s time to expand my audience.  Now get busy!

Results will be posted sometime in the next two weeks, so if you are someone entering that I don’t know how to get ahold of, make sure you check back later to see if you’ve won.  Good luck!

2011 Maryland Wine Festival

As any red-blooded, alpha-male jock can tell you, while it’s nice to develop a skill for the sake of self-improvement, if you’re not using that skill to crush the hopes and dreams of another, then it has clearly gone wasted.  Such is the logic behind the amateur wine competition I entered last week at the 28^th annual Maryland Wine Festival. 

This occasion - a two-day event which sports thousands of attendees, hundreds of wines to taste from dozens of wineries, live music, food and craft vendors and a genuine party atmosphere - also acts as the premier opportunity for amateur winemakers from the state to pit their homemade wines against each other mano a mano.  (And that’s including next month’s state fair, which offers the chance to compare your wine to Aunt May’s peach jam in the prestigious “fruit product” category.)

The judging is conducted by members of the American Wine Society using the widely accepted 20-point scale developed by University of California-Davis, which aggregates ratings in the categories of Appearance, Aroma and Bouquet, Taste, Aftertaste and Overall Impression.  Including my 2010 Chardonnay and Malbec, there were 31 wines entered from eight different winemakers.  (Yes eight, in the entire state of Maryland.  See why I need to move to Oregon?)

As the results show here, I was unable to take down Greg Sliviak from Sykesville, who won the competition for the third year running with one of his popular raspberry wine entries, earning an 18.0 score.  Both of my wines earned a score of 14.0, enough to place them in the top third of the competitors.  Considering these were my first attempts at home winemaking, and I know what I would do differently to improve them both, I view it as a pretty good result overall.  However, being the math nerd that I am, a couple simple calculations revealed that when analyzing the overall results by winemaker, my average score would actually put me in a tie for second among the eight competitors, and let’s face it, I would never have dreamed of beating Mr. Sliviak and his golden raspberries from heaven.

All in all, it was a great experience, and needless to say, the two Certificates of Merit I earned have been proudly framed and mounted in the house, garnering a prominent place on the living room wall.

My First Time

They say you never forget your first time.  The nervous pit in your stomach.  The fear of messing up.  The desire to make it last, but the realization that it’s over all too quickly.  I’m speaking, of course, about your first harvest, and true to form I ran the full gamut of emotions as I brought my own grapes in this weekend, though not before dealing with one final crisis along the way.

When I went to check on the vineyard to take my weekly sugar measurement, it was immediately apparent that the grapes had been overrun by swarms of bees, wasps and yellow jackets.  What last week had been the one-off flying pest and morphed into hundreds of creatures feasting on my fruit.  The Brix (sugar content) measured at 20.1, short of the 22 I was targeting, but the books say 20 to 24 will do, so fearing that there would be nothing left to pick in a week, we quickly shifted to emergency harvest mode. 

A light drizzle set the mood, and with Mom, Dad, Macy and I hard at work, first to untie the bird netting, then to delicately remove the bunches one at a time as the stinging creatures circled desperate for one last meal, we were done within 15 minutes.  All in, we filled one large lug with about 36lbs of grapes, enough to yield maybe half a case of wine.  If I can learn from this year’s mistakes and the vines continue to mature, it’s fair to expect twice that output next year, but at this point anything will do.

With late night help from Drew and my neighbor Cliff, my new crusher/destemmer admirably performed the job I asked of it, and the must is now quietly fermenting in a bucket in my kitchen. 

Years of anticipation over in a matter of moments.  Not unlike another first I remember those many years ago.

 

Shopping Spree

In anticipation of my pending first harvest, I decided it was finally time to bite the bullet and acquire the final and most expensive piece of winemaking equipment that I didn’t yet own:  the crusher/destemmer.  I bought the cheapest one available, a hand-cranked model for $600, but compared to the rental rate of $20 per usage I’ve been paying, I’ve basically just committed myself to maintaining this hobby for at least the next ten years in order to justify the three times a year I expect to use the machine.  Either that, or the wine I’m making will amortize out to a cost per bottle to rival some of the greatest wines in the world.

And since I was headed to the winemaking store anyway, it seemed only appropriate to prepare a thorough list of equipment and supplies that will come in handy as the busiest time of the winemaker’s year approaches.  So, in addition to the crusher/destemmer, which itself takes up every remaining available square inch of my winemaking laboratory (aka the garage), I also came home with a much needed one-man floor corker and a giant, 44-gallon fermentation tub which literally doesn’t fit through my front door.  Needless to say, I won’t be giving myself a Christmas present this year.

44-gal fermentation tub next to
a 6-gal bucket for scale

Meanwhile, the date of my first harvest fast approaches.  Last weekend’s brix reading was 19.2, slightly less than predicted, so I’m now expecting to pick sometime in the next 10 days.  If I was a professional winemaker, I would be miserable right now about how a week straight of torrential downpour will have diluted the overall quality of my wine, but at this point I’m so excited about my new toys that I’m not going to let a little rain (or twenty inches of it, actually) bring me down.