Just a Little Blue House

It has been awhile since either of us have commented on the wine making activities so I figured I would give an update! We last left off here in our grape stomping/primary fermenting stages. As some of you may know, wine making is very much about patience. A couple of months after racking to the secondaries, we decided to give it a bit of a taste test. It was delicious – if you like beverages that are face-puckering sour. It is not a total surprise that wine made from juice stomped out of them would be sour as well, but I suppose we thought it would mellow.

Drastic times call for drastic measures. We couldn’t dilute the wine with water anymore due to the fact that it would lose its ability to be stored in the bottles. Dad and I found some grape juice concentrate and decided to mix it into the mustang wine, then pitched a similar yeast into the mix, allowing the newly-mixed sugars to be assimilated. While this helped, it was not nearly enough to combat the acidity of the liquid. My initial test indicated that the wine was roughly 1.4% acidity, over double what we wanted! The dilution dropped the solution down to .9% acidity which was better but still not nearly far enough. I then added potassium bicarbonate as a way to stabilize and bind some of the acid and drop it out of the solution to the bottom of the carboy.

What was the result? Something drinkable! While not the best thing we’ve ever tasted, it had a good flavor (much like the flavor of the grapes). We bottled it in hopes that it may age well. We’ll see in a couple of years?

On a more positive note regarding our little wine making escapades…

Shortly after the mustang wine was first started, I decided to try my hand at making a Mead, which is basically a type of wine made from honey, water, and fruit/flavoring additions if you want to get particularly tricky. Minus the stomping, the process is very similar minus some more technical issues regarding nutrient requirements of yeast varieties which is far too boring for this blog .

The final result however is quite tasty! While it is still young, it should age quite well over time. The nose on it is absolutely delightful, however the wine itself is very dry (low residual sugar). Here are a few images of us finally bottling the finished product! Notice the golden color and crystal clear liquid. A good sign!

My brother and I getting ready to bottle out of the carboy

Nice honey-colored end result! Bottling ensues!

Me trying to figure out how to use the corker. Takes a bit of work!

Now for storage!

the Toyota Yaris

Kellan and I must be attracted to the color bright, electric blue because not only did we paint our two sides of our house bright blue, when it came to buying a car, guess what, its also bright blue! It’s a cute little thing! We got our “little blue car” a couple of months ago, so it may be old news to some of you, but it still feels nice and new to us!

We definitely didn’t have it in our “plans” to buy a car so soon after getting married, but my Altima pretty decided to quit working. It would have been great other than the fact that after running some errands one evening, the engine started smokin’! I got out of that car pretty fast that night. Well, Kellan made some valient attempts at fixing it, but alas we had a decision to make. We had recently dumped some money into repairs and if we proceeded to fix the car again, we would have exceeded the value of the car, thus we started to look for a new car.

We came across our little blue car pretty quickly actually! It was the last week of the year so we think we got a good deal on the car, but that’s what the dealers always make you think,right? Oh well! We ended up with a 2008 Yaris with 25,000 miles on it. AND, its fun to drive ! It’s a very small car, but we both actually would say its pretty spacious on the inside. AND, its blue and cute ! I think the mpg is sitting around 35? An extra bonus for sure. I quite enjoy the car and feel very blessed and thankful that we were able to find a dependable car. Its very interesting making “grown-up” decisions as a couple. While our thoughts were more like, “oh dang it, we have to buy a car…”, it was very comforting to know we were doing it together and that we have each other to bounce ideas off of.

I do have to say this though. The one good thing about the Altima was that it was gold. Which meant I didn’t have to wash it because it just really never looked that dirty! So much for that, blue cars do not stay clean! But it is a great color, so I guess I can deal !