MAKING A GREAT WINE THE EASY WAY

One of life little pleasures is sipping a nice glass of wine with my girls. I've been meaning go get some started but it's been one thing after another and I never seem to take the time to do it. I wanted to have some for Christmas since all my girls will be home.  So on April 13, I made a special effort to get to Wine Kitz up town and purchased two wine kits since I wanted a white and a red wine.
It just happened that both of the wines that I wanted were on sale for 20% off. I saved $50. plus a bit of tax. An unexpected nice surprise.

George looking at something as he walks to the store. I'm so glad that he could spare the time to help me.

I happen to love a full bodied Ultimate Estate Gewurztraminer and I'm not a wine connoisseur like my son in law is but it's a darn good wine. Although I love red wine, I'm always afraid to drink some as I get terrible stomach cramps and red face with big headaches. I will try one sip and wait to see if I react before consuming anymore. I explain this to the lady at the wine store and told her what I was looking for and she suggested Valpolicella  pronounces val-poly-chella.
I've tried it and it's a lovely wine and I have no adverse effect with it so I'm really happy. I know that the girls will love it. I'll try some other types later.

With two batches I knew that I would need some help to bottle and cap and seal and I asked my husband George if he could help me bottle. My appointment was at 3:00PM and I needed to be back at work for 4:00PM to feed the calves and check on the expectant heifer.

The kits come in big boxes and the grape juice is in thick plastic bags. There are a lot of carboys   full of wine waiting to be bottled. The big plastic containers each hold fermenting wine.I'm only showing one section of the long room.

 My wine was ready to bottle on the 17 of June but since they had a sale, they were bursting at the seam with customers wanting in on the deal. I could only get an appointment on the 26th of June for bottling.

Here is another room with full of carboys filled with wine and again, only a section is showing.

Together it only took us 30 minutes from start to finish to process both batches. Each batch is 22 litres. A large bottle of wine is 1 litre and a small bottle is 750 ml.  The girl told me that I would need 62 small bottles. Since I had 22 large one litre bottles and 31 smaller bottles I had just enough. I washed bottles at home until my legs got numb from standing. That was the only real hard work I had to do to get my wine ready.

On the other side of this wall there are a multitude of wine kits and on this wall supplies for those who make their own wine at home.

 The folks at Wine Kitz were so helpful, they help carry the boxes of bottles from the car and back again when we were done. We worked super fast as time is money for them. They are very busy all the time.

Some wine labels for a variety of wine.  Not showing,  a section for plastic toppers to add a nice finish to the wine bottle.

You can see the corking machine on the left side of the photo above. The bottle sits on that little platform and it goes down . The cork goes above that shiny thing on the top and the see through door is closed and the cork is pushed into the bottle in the blink of an eye.
I asked permission to take photos of course and explained that some of my blog followers had never heard of such a store.  She was all too happy to oblige.

Since we were in such a rush, the photos are just snap shots and not great quality.

This is my uncle's  brother in law, not my sister in law as previously stated, lol. What a surprise to see him working there.
While I was running around taking pictures and choosing labels he sterilized my bottles.  Against the wall are my bottles. He was finishing off someone else 's wine.  That machine is adjustable for different height bottles. Here he was finishing filling someone's bottles.

The system is flushed and cleaned for my batch. In the back, the lady is putting another batch of my smaller bottles through the sanitizer.
On the right of the photo is the corking chamber. Sorry. I forgot to take a decent photo of it. I would have needed another person to take photos.

This little red hot coil is the plastic cap shrinker. All I did was place a plastic cap on the bottle and place the top of the bottle in the coil for one second only and the plastic shrinks tight on the bottle top.   It's quick and very easy. You place the bottle in a compartment and place a cork on top and close the compartment door and the pressure pushes the cork in and you open the door and remove the bottle.

With every batch of wine there is a little extra left over and George was in a rush to try it.
See the plastic cap on top of the green bottle.


I hope that you enjoyed seeing how easy the process  of making your own wine without the fuss of caring for it at home if you are a busy person. There are several wine making stores in my city and probably in yours too. I hope that you give it a try if you drink wine. It's way cheaper than buying wine at the liquor store.

Thanks for stopping by for a visit and be sure to follow my blog by clicking the Bloglovin button on my side bar. Only a few days left before July 1st and Blogger will discontinue Blog Reader.
I'm looking forward to reading your comments. They are like personal visit and I love them.

JB

SOMETHING PINK, WINE, FLOWERS AND WEEDS

I finally remembered to get some pink yarn to knit a scarf this week. Every time I go up town, I'm running late and have to rush home in time to feed the calves. This week I made a special effort to get the yarn, I was late to feed the calves and they were happy when I finally arrived to feed them.

It's a knit one purl one repeated over and over. It's called the seed stitch. I only knit a little bit when I get a chance at night.

Tonight, I'm washing some wine bottles. This is an older picture that I had on file so I'm using it again.
I wish that I could just wiggle my nose and they would all be sparkling clean.

I'm getting ready for bottling some wine tomorrow. I do it the lazy way at WineKitz. I chose the wine kits  I want, I pay them and they get the batches fermenting. I make a date for bottling and
 and tomorrow I'll bring my own clean bottles and they will sterilize them.
This time I'm making a batch of my favorite white wine, Ultimate Estate full bodied Gewurztraminer  and a batch of red wine called Ultimate Valpolicella.

I have a  jungle in my own backyard. I'm pretty sure that I will encounter a lion or monkey in there. I can hear the birds on the wire laughing at me.
This is a flowerbed that runs all along the length of the backyard. It was so hot and sunny and the photo didn't turned out well.

It was a matted mess of weeds of every kinds. Where to begin? The front of the garden was in the sun so I started in the back where it was cooler but still muggy. I armed myself with Deep Wood and braved the lion size mosquitoes.

 I decided to weed a path from the front so that I could carry my bucket of weeds to the wheelbarrow back and forth and this was the spot I chose between two peonies that were in buds.

This is the beginning of the garden by  my son's black shed  that is still there since... way back when...
Notice my fiddleheads that I transplanted last spring. I just dug them up from our land by the edge of the river. They grow long stems under ground and out pops up another fiddlehead. They are rather decorative when you let them grow.

My progress, I now have a clearing in the back of the flowerbed framed by wild cedar  hedge at the back.

View of the front after some weeding. It's difficult to get the whole bed in the picture. The sun makes everything so pale.

You guessed it, I'm now tackling the other end by the white shed.  My colorado Blue spruce has some dying branches that I will cut off since my Azaleas are growing under.

This is the section of my flowerbed that is in front of my Colorado Blue Spruce.
I pulled the very tall weeds by hand so I could see where some perennials were before sticking my fork in.You can see a few paver bricks but most are completely covered with grass.

Here I have removed the grass from the paver bricks.
I still have a lot of work to do  It gives you an idea how much this flowerbed needed some rescue. I'm far from done. Got chased in by a big thunder shower  so that I could blog.

I know that I bore you to death with all my weeding but someone has to do it. Just be thankful that you don't have to do it, he,he.

This is why I do it. So I can enjoy the fruit of my labor. Maybe next year I won't have to work so hard. That would be nice but I'm only dreaming.

Have a good week and thanks so much for visiting me. I appreciate that you take the time to leave a comment.

JB