Now that the bottles are here…

….Clyde is working feverishly on getting the wine ready to bottle!  Here are a couple of sample bottles of wine from Monday:

Notice how the bottle on the left is a nice light yellow?  And the bottle on the right is a pinky hue?  The ‘vidal’ bottle (I’m not sure that is the actual variety that he was testing here, but regardless…) didn’t have many sulphites in the wine.  Sulphite keeps the wine from oxidizing, so you can see that two days later, the color has changed and if you smelled it, you’d notice a weird smell to it as well.  Both bottles started out the same color on Monday!

Today Clyde is busy filtering.  Here’s the set up:

I’ll see if I can get better photos later of this process.  Basically though, the wine is mixed with diatomaceous earth (called DE, go figure!) and then pumped through these big white pads.  The DE builds up on the pads and takes out all kinds of things….bacteria, yeast, sugar particles, etc.  Once the wine gets through this machine, we are ready to go.  So we plan on bottling tomorrow morning.  Yea!

Today I cleaned up the cottage from a previous guest, and just fell in love with all the redbuds which are in full bloom.  Plus all the greens are turning vibrant around here.  Here’s a view from the back porch of the cottage (I’m going to put up a close-up on my personal blog here in a second if you want to check out another flower photo!):

And while we are speaking of the cottage – Bob is headed down next week to tear off this old heaving deck and replace it in another two weeks with a brand-spanking new one.  Oooooo aaaaah ooooooh.  My appologies for any inconveniences this causes.  However, I know what I’ll be blogging about in the near future too!  Cheers!