Tag Archives: Wine

Ok, so it’s a kitchen island, not a wall. And if you count, there are 26 actual bottles. But six of them are half-size mini bottles, so if you’re measuring volume it works out to twenty three.
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Today the blood orange wine was supposed to be all bottled and corked. It isn’t. I’ve got three or four dozen bottles and corks in tubs of sanitizer in my kitchen. I’ve got the carboy of wine up from the basement and on the kitchen counter. I have my racking cane and siphoning tube all ready to go and I’ve borrowed my friend Rob’s floor standing corker.

And it’s all going to have to sit there for a while. When I brought the carboy up from the basement, it was jostled enough to cloud up a bit.
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The blueberry wine is alive. I generally put a paper towel over the mouth of the carboy when the wine is starting so that air can get in, but dust can’t. I hold it in place with a sterilized rubber band or hair-tie. The blueberry started foaming up a bit the night before last, and it did it even more yesterday. This morning it was insane. The towel was bulging and stained purple from berry juice, and when I removed it from the top, there was a near-volcanic outpouring of pulped berry bits.
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We got another batch of wine going last night. We’ve got apple, pumpkin and blood orange all going in the basement, and the blood orange is just about ready to bottle (we’ll probably do that on Sunday), so we were talking about what we might want to do for our next batch. Last Saturday someone (I forget who) had mentioned that blueberries were on sale at Kroger… So on Monday I checked and found a recipe in the Winemaker’s Companion for blueberry wine.
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One of our favorite places to grocery shop is Hillers Market in the Arborland complex on Washtenaw. It’s a little more expensive than some of the alternatives, but the selection is just amazing. The international foods area has all sorts of imports from Japan and Great Britain. Not just Pocky or Cadbury chocolates either. I’m talking about things like cans of Spotted Dick, tubes of fishpaste, bags of dried squid and little green tea candies. They are definately targeting the international student and expatriate community.

Stationed near the meat counter in the back of the store there are a couple of shopping carts. This is where you can find overstock and understock food and wine, and it’s why Hillers is one of the most frustrating places in Ann Arbor to shop for wine.
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I blather on about wine enough that I decided I might as well create a new category specifically about it…

The orange wine is fizzing away merrily in the kitchen sink. Tomorrow I’ll top it off and some time on Saturday I’ll put the water lock in place. The wine yeast is devouring the sugar and producing happy bubbles of CO₂. The whole kitchen smells strange. Like a very sweet orange muffin.
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