Up the apples and pears (stairs): a video guide to making cider

Another video-supported** how-to!

This time on making cider, in IV parts.

Pt. I

Pt. II

Pt. III

Pt. IV

— Combrailles, Auvergne

** For more Essential video-guides see:

— On bottling teen-tiny quantities of wine

— On planting posts in vines

Undocumented moments in wine | Note(s) to self next time someone comes to taste

Seem like you know what you did even though you don’t.

People will try to take photos of you. Work with them or it will not work. Multiple chins are not a good look.

Know thy prices!

Know the quantity you have left to sell!

I repeat: Don’t talk down your wine,

let the taster give their thoughts first.

Expect them to be late, you know you would be if it was you.

Open question: Is showing photos of you harvesting on crutches cool?

Provide guest with a clean glass. 

It should not smell. 

It should not be schmered with finger grease, lip prints or ex-cassoulet fat.

Provide something to spit in that's not so shallow it spits back. 

Read the room: some people like the x day maceration blabla, others less so.

Snacks are nice! 

This is France!

Call it casse-croûte.

Watch your dose. Don't serve to drink nor stingy-drip low.

You've had millions of problems this year, yes. They don't need to know (about them all).

Smile! 

Relax!

Rinse your vanne! Check your chapeaux!

Don’t stir the lies with your pipette. It's awkward to have an audience watch you sucking up barrel-overflow yelling suck-suck-go-go

(three men deep in a cave plus me, trust me I know.)

Leave the wines with sugar til last? They're not a pro? Maybe don't bother with them (the not-finished wines I mean) at all?

Don’t seem insecure even though you are because you've forgotten what got mixed into where or when or why or what's actually in this damejean or how.

Do try to breathe, slow it down. PEOPLE ARE VISITING YOU TO TASTE YOUR WINES! You are an imposter only as long as you feel you are.

undocumented moments in wine: a video guide to bottling tiny quantities of wine

Requirements:

— wine

— bottles

— boxes

— buckets

— siphon

— gravity

—snacks

— corks or caps

— a corker or capsuleuse

— 3 people and more time than you think

Let's begin.

1.

You've made a tiny amount of wine!

It's dry!

You think! 

You live very far away from your wine!

Anyway on Wednesday you have some time!

Time to bottle it, no matter if the moon is badly aligned.

2.

You are full of hope and expectation!

Imagine if it turns out to be good!

Even great!

You smell!

It's just OK. 

3.

The siphon!

It is an art!

Don't also make wine hitting the deeper most part of your lungs a surprise! 

Suck from high!

Keep it art.

4.

When you bottle wine, you must re and re and re-try your wine.

You'll get drunk.

It's fine.

5.

You've successfully siphoned your wine from the big bottle you fermented it in into the small bottle you'll drink it from.

It's time to cork!

The corker of course won't work!

6.

Force (generally) works.

!! Now let's bottle a tiny cuve !!

1.

Deflate and remove the chapeau.

This will be the first time in months you've checked what's going on inside the tank.

This is a good time to pray.

2.

You have learned how not to choke on the first suck of the siphon.

 And you probably already knew that for a siphon to work, the level at which you bottle will need to be lower than the liquid line.

But you probably forgot at the crucial moment to remember: when the tank is empty.

3.

Stop to eat snacks.

Always have snacks.

4.

I wouldn't recommend doing this.

I recommended they didn't do this.

Doing this means you shake up all the muddy stuff at the bottom and mix it in your clear wine = muddy wine.

Why are they doing this? 

The tank wasn't high enough to siphon from.

(If you DO do this, I would recommend you leave the tank to rest a bit so everything settles.)

5.

Now the tank is high but the siphon is too short! 

So you bottle directly from the tap.

This is making wine!

(6.)

Here's something nifty I learned!

You saw Gaspard filling the jerobaum, right?

Well the jerobaum didn't fit in the corker thing.

What to do?

What Gaspard did was use the corker to compress the cork then jammed it down the neck of the bottle a la main.

"Neat!"

as they say.

You have successfully bottled your tiny quantity of wine!

You are drunk!

You will bring your wine everywhere you go, give a big proportion away.

You will realise you now have only but the tiniest quantity of wine left.

But that's what wine's for!

so it's OK. 

:)

— With thanks to Aaron Ayscough and Gaspard Valette for a great day.

Undocumented moments in the vines | a video guide to planting posts

You won’t need to plant posts unless you’re unlucky, or planting a vineyard, or unlucky to have rotten posts which you won’t if they're acacia like these are (chop-chopped from the forest and hand-cut too). But here's a six-step how-to in case you do — and in new format to boot! At the time I didn't know the words so I gestured and made sounds, but here I'm calling the format "onomatopoeic video".

Step 1: tchhur-tschuur

Step 2: ffflupt

Step 3: schliing-schliing

Step 4: tschik-tschik

Step 5: thread

(tighten&snip)

Step 6: schlick-shlick

et repeat!

— Volvic, Auvergne

D.I.Y Georgian wine in 10 (easy) steps

(You've already picked the grapes and punched a hole in your bucket cus that's obvious stuff.)

Step 1:

Roll your qvevri into a friendly winemaker's marani and bury it, packing it in with sand.

Step 2:

Set up your gear.

All of it.

Step 3:

Put some grapes — stems, bugs and all — into the bucket with the hole in and balance this on something high up but less precarious than some uneven bricks. 

Wash your feet and get in.

 Start  

s
t
o
 m

 p i n g.

Step 4:

Should look like this ↓

Step 5:

Around this point you'll probably realise you're going to need to get out and clean another vessel to put the juice in.

Get out and clean one or learn from our mistake and do it earlier.

Step 6: 

Pour juice into new vessel.

Marvel at it.

Taste it.

Step 7:

Get back in again and get your friends working too 'cus you have a shitload of grapes to get through and the romance of pressing your grapes by foot wears off sooner than you might think.

 Step 8:

You're 3 hours of stomping in and the neighbour has already come out (twice) and added you on Facebook just — you think — because he can (because you can't understand him).

You haven't eaten anything.

It's crazy hot even though it's October.

 Draft in anyone else.

"LOL"

↓

Step 9:

Gently press the stomped grapes with a hand press.

(This is optional but recommended if you don't have a lot of grapes but you want a lot of wine).

Step 10:

With skins/stems: Transfer juice and desired amount of skins into qvevri (not too full!) and wait for alcoholic fermentation to start. Do some punchdowns. Wait for your desired length of maceration, remove skins/stems, wait for malolactic fermentation, wait some more. You've got wine.

Without skins: Transfer juice into qvevri and wait for fermentation to start, do some punchdowns, wait, wait for malolactic fermentation, wait, wait some more. You've got wine.

Go drink someone else's wine. (That afternoon we drank Ènek's).

This will be Emily and Jeremy's second vintage, made from a blend of Mujuretuli, Aleksandrouli and Kabistoni grapes grown by Engus Natmeladze. Their documentary on Georgian wine, Our Blood is Wine will be released next spring. 

You can taste a bottle from their last vintage at Le Carton's Georgian Wine Dinner on Sunday. Two words: Georgian BOJO.

Need something to eat with your new wine? Read my how-to on how to butcher a lamb.

When farm to table literally means a table on a farm

The lamb was killed the day before and hung. You can't eat an animal right away because of rigor mortis, the stiffening that sets in after death.

Remove the head right before the first vertebrae from the top of where the neck starts. The higher up you go, the more neck meat you'll have. And neck meat is good.

Cut the skin around the legs and pull down, easing it with a knife. Find the white film on the under side of the skin and cut with it.

Show mercy to pineapples, make tepache

For all the times I’ve thought to myself ,“I could do that”, this was for then.

It was, I admit, also a measure taken in desperation; desperate to counter the rain and the way it was flattening our spirits. My sister had come to spend 10 days of engineering picnic baskets to bikes and jumping off boats. Instead, she spent 8 of them trapped indoors on a roll mat.

What to do? Finally do what I said I could if everyone else was: put something in a jar and ferment it.

So we made tepache, Mexican moonshine made of the skins and hearts of a pineapples, water, cinnamon and brown sugar. We put it in a big pickle jar (what else?), sealed it, put a cute sticker on it and waited for the wild yeasts to come. Then we poured it over ice, sat back on the roll mat and watched the rains.

Note on the taste: 

Tepache turns out to be pretty damn sweet and after a few days of experimenting, we figured out the following:

1. It’s best mixed with a Mexican beer
2. Unless you like the sweet thing and then you can add rum or tequila
3. The longer you leave it, the more effervescent it becomes, buzzy, malty. I never read the last step of the instructions below until I wrote them out now, 7 days later and mine’s still not strained, not in the fridge, definitely still fermenting and I’m still alive. So go for it.