Re-cycling food scraps into eggs is part of the satisfaction of owning chooks. Free ranging chooks that have lots of greens and juicy bugs produce the richest yolks of unrivalled quality. The pleasure of a freshly laid egg is best enjoyed softly boiled, spilling onto lightly buttered toasted sour dough bread, add a few flakes of salt, nothing more.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Re-cycling food scraps into eggs is part of the satisfaction of owning chooks. Free ranging chooks that have lots of greens and juicy bugs produce the richest yolks of unrivalled quality. The pleasure of a freshly laid egg is best enjoyed softly boiled, spilling onto lightly buttered toasted sour dough bread, add a few flakes of salt, nothing more.
Friday, January 30, 2009
some fruit and vegetables like the heat
Not everything suffers with the heat. Our Mulberry crop this year is the best ever. Just back from the veggie patch and the tomatoes are amazing, bursting with flavour and ripening before your eyes.
Hot Dry and Time To Pick
The sugar levels race up in this heat, the normal rise is one baume per week, this is a good guide to knowing when you need to test for ripeness of flavour and that all important balance between sugar and acid.
This year is hotter than most. And so dry.
Even though 40 degrees starts to feel cool following 45 and 44....
The vines struggle to keep moisture in the grapes
Harvesters are out
We are planning the first hand pick Riesling this week, bunch selecting the flavour ripe berries for our own wine.
Any time soon we'll be out in the Old Vine Shiraz snipping bunches for our premium blend.
6am start planned and looking for any day under 35 as a 'cool' option!
This year is hotter than most. And so dry.
Even though 40 degrees starts to feel cool following 45 and 44....
The vines struggle to keep moisture in the grapes
Harvesters are out
We are planning the first hand pick Riesling this week, bunch selecting the flavour ripe berries for our own wine.
Any time soon we'll be out in the Old Vine Shiraz snipping bunches for our premium blend.
6am start planned and looking for any day under 35 as a 'cool' option!
Saturday, January 17, 2009
First Harvest of Verjuice
Verjuice Viognier harvested on 15 January. Lovely big bunches, still sharp and green but with a number of pearly grapes. Our Viognier coped with the 41 degree day ... many other growers didn't have such luck.
We picked by hand in the cool of the moring, a very early pick and more in the style of 'Agraz', a sour tang. 6 degrees Baume - low sugar and high acid. Crushed and bottled a small batch, holding back some for blending for the Premium Verjuice range.
We picked by hand in the cool of the moring, a very early pick and more in the style of 'Agraz', a sour tang. 6 degrees Baume - low sugar and high acid. Crushed and bottled a small batch, holding back some for blending for the Premium Verjuice range.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Watching, Waiting, Ripening
Watching, Waiting, Ripening time. Mid-January and the grapes are just turning from hard little green nuggets to opaque juicy fruit for the white grapes, and colour in the red grapes.
Veraison is the term for this first stage of ripeness. Followed by progressive ripening, that is the sugar increases and acid decreases.
Between now and pick day we wait anxiously and watch the weather, obsessively. The size of crop and quality of grapes is all up to the gods from here. With a little help from the bore water. The Weather Bureau website sits open on our computer screen, it may be true that a watched radar never rains.
Mostly we want rain, city dwellers will wonder if the weather is ever right for farmers as the next stage of ripeness we spend hoping that we don’t get a downpour. When the grapes are going through the ripening period there is this tricky spot where a big dump from the sky will split the berries in half. It happens often enough. Generally we’re all fossicking about with the soil, is it too dry? If the weather is too hot and the vines struggle you can lose berries, bunches and even your whole crop. Too many days over 30 degrees or high winds and the vines shut up shop and go into survival mode.
Wind and heat evaporates what little moisture there is. This is a hard year and the vines are struggling following three years of drought conditions.
Sounds gloomy? Not really, that is farming. You do a lot of predicting and planning in advance setting the vines up for the best chance of survival and good crops then you stop worrying, OK we do moan about the weather but always followed by a shrug and on with the next job, finally it is all about relying on uncontrollable and often unpredictable weather.
We have noted colour in the Shiraz in the Bovate Vineyard, just the odd berry only a few days ago yet today there are whole bunches turning a bright pink to deep rosey red. Our ranging chooks are already filling their bellies by jumping up to pluck grapes from the canopy.
Picking grapes for wine is still weeks away. Our estimate is one month to the white pick and the reds around six weeks. Red grapes in McLaren Vale aren’t ‘flavour ripe’ until they reach quite high sugar levels. With white grapes we’re going for a fresher higher acid style of wine so naturally we pick earlier.
But picking will start here at Producers very soon - for Agraz and Verjuice - we are tasting the Riesling daily, checking when it is at the right stage of acid to fruit flavour balance for making our Verjuice. We have made verjuice from a variety of grapes but Riesling remains my favourite for adding to salads and lifting flavour in sauces and dressings. I can hardly wait and it takes great patience to leave them just-one-more-day. The window for making perfect verjuice is only a matter of days so the right time for picking is crucial.
Veraison is the term for this first stage of ripeness. Followed by progressive ripening, that is the sugar increases and acid decreases.
Between now and pick day we wait anxiously and watch the weather, obsessively. The size of crop and quality of grapes is all up to the gods from here. With a little help from the bore water. The Weather Bureau website sits open on our computer screen, it may be true that a watched radar never rains.
Mostly we want rain, city dwellers will wonder if the weather is ever right for farmers as the next stage of ripeness we spend hoping that we don’t get a downpour. When the grapes are going through the ripening period there is this tricky spot where a big dump from the sky will split the berries in half. It happens often enough. Generally we’re all fossicking about with the soil, is it too dry? If the weather is too hot and the vines struggle you can lose berries, bunches and even your whole crop. Too many days over 30 degrees or high winds and the vines shut up shop and go into survival mode.
Wind and heat evaporates what little moisture there is. This is a hard year and the vines are struggling following three years of drought conditions.
Sounds gloomy? Not really, that is farming. You do a lot of predicting and planning in advance setting the vines up for the best chance of survival and good crops then you stop worrying, OK we do moan about the weather but always followed by a shrug and on with the next job, finally it is all about relying on uncontrollable and often unpredictable weather.
We have noted colour in the Shiraz in the Bovate Vineyard, just the odd berry only a few days ago yet today there are whole bunches turning a bright pink to deep rosey red. Our ranging chooks are already filling their bellies by jumping up to pluck grapes from the canopy.
Picking grapes for wine is still weeks away. Our estimate is one month to the white pick and the reds around six weeks. Red grapes in McLaren Vale aren’t ‘flavour ripe’ until they reach quite high sugar levels. With white grapes we’re going for a fresher higher acid style of wine so naturally we pick earlier.
But picking will start here at Producers very soon - for Agraz and Verjuice - we are tasting the Riesling daily, checking when it is at the right stage of acid to fruit flavour balance for making our Verjuice. We have made verjuice from a variety of grapes but Riesling remains my favourite for adding to salads and lifting flavour in sauces and dressings. I can hardly wait and it takes great patience to leave them just-one-more-day. The window for making perfect verjuice is only a matter of days so the right time for picking is crucial.
Monday, December 29, 2008
You can't make good wine from bad grapes
For anyone with a first or second generation Italian neighbour you are already aware that making your own wine, like growing your own veggies, is more about family and friends than winning awards. The extreme pleasure of pulling out a cork, popping the crown seal of your own wine, or tomato sauce, is a sense of moulding destiny.
The process for making really good red wine at home is fairly simple:
get good grapes
crush
ferment
plunge the caps
press off the wine
rack
bottle
If you’re unsure try a simple ‘Harvest Wine’ first, it is a fresh wine, drunk a week or so after harvest as soon as the sugars have converted enough alcohol, a light fruity wine that is best drunk chilled.
If you are patient, the most rewarding homemade wine is an aged red. This is also an economical way to create your own good quality ‘house red’.
Wine is very forgiving and yet easily spoiled. The line between is about being careful - select good grapes and then keep everything clean.
My own first batches of homemade wine were fairly dreadful due mostly to the only offer of grapes coming from growers with some over-watered overripe obscure variety, picked in the heat of day and ferried across town in the back of a trailer so that the start to life was a sweet slightly rancid juice. The resulting wine was, well, sweet and slightly rancid. The importance of getting good grapes in the first place is summed up in the often quoted winemakers’ saying ‘you can make bad wine from good grapes but you can’t make good wine from bad grapes’.
The process for making really good red wine at home is fairly simple:
get good grapes
crush
ferment
plunge the caps
press off the wine
rack
bottle
If you’re unsure try a simple ‘Harvest Wine’ first, it is a fresh wine, drunk a week or so after harvest as soon as the sugars have converted enough alcohol, a light fruity wine that is best drunk chilled.
If you are patient, the most rewarding homemade wine is an aged red. This is also an economical way to create your own good quality ‘house red’.
Wine is very forgiving and yet easily spoiled. The line between is about being careful - select good grapes and then keep everything clean.
My own first batches of homemade wine were fairly dreadful due mostly to the only offer of grapes coming from growers with some over-watered overripe obscure variety, picked in the heat of day and ferried across town in the back of a trailer so that the start to life was a sweet slightly rancid juice. The resulting wine was, well, sweet and slightly rancid. The importance of getting good grapes in the first place is summed up in the often quoted winemakers’ saying ‘you can make bad wine from good grapes but you can’t make good wine from bad grapes’.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Bury me deep in my vineyard
We went from being weekend hobby block veggie growers to 'serious grapegrowers' because of Wally Boehm.
Wally was an inspiring man in every way - he taught us as much about how to live as how to grow good vines.
In his memory, his favourite quote, which is now more or less our own:
"Bury me deep in my vineyard,
My wish is to nourish the plant which kept me in rapture while living.
Long may it garnish my sod."
Authour unknown.
We are the custodians of Wally's vineyard. He was buried in the more traditional way but we have symbolically, ceremoniously buried Wally deep in his vineyard and our Riesling (his favourite grape and the vines he planted) is always in honour of Wally.
Quote from 'Deep in my Vineyard' by E.W.Boehm, a self published book printed by Gillingham Printers and copyright to EW Boehm 1987.
Wally was an inspiring man in every way - he taught us as much about how to live as how to grow good vines.
In his memory, his favourite quote, which is now more or less our own:
"Bury me deep in my vineyard,
My wish is to nourish the plant which kept me in rapture while living.
Long may it garnish my sod."
Authour unknown.
We are the custodians of Wally's vineyard. He was buried in the more traditional way but we have symbolically, ceremoniously buried Wally deep in his vineyard and our Riesling (his favourite grape and the vines he planted) is always in honour of Wally.
Quote from 'Deep in my Vineyard' by E.W.Boehm, a self published book printed by Gillingham Printers and copyright to EW Boehm 1987.
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