Diary of a Distiller

I'm going to keep it brief this week. It's been hectic up here in Maine for me, and I am heading out for the weekend for a much needed vacation. Maine's nickname is "The Vacationland," so how come I feel like I need to get away to get mine? I thought I had a vacation early this summer around the Fourth of July, but it wasn't as relaxing as I needed. I was so set on relaxing that I never did.

Then I was in New Orleans for eight days for Tales of the Cocktail, but that turned out to be hectic work as well. So I'm heading down to the Hampton's on Long Island in New York for the weekend. I'll be seeing some of my oldest friends who I have known since I was in my late teens. It's been a year or two since I last saw some of them and it should be fun.

Follow up:

So it's wine making time for us at Winterport Winery, and bottling time as well. We have been making blueberry wine this week. The wild Maine blueberries are in season and we are making the most of it. These tiny, low bush blueberries have an intense, sweet flavor. Much better than those giant blueberries you see most of the time in the supermarkets. We have had an order placed for a year waiting for harvest time and earlier this week we got our delivery of organically grown wild blueberries. Joan scooped up four quarts for me to take home and packaged up a many more for the rest of the crew. I figure I'll take mine to the party and make blueberry pancakes and preserves for breakfast.

As for bottling, our sparkling apricot wine, Fancy That, became the star at a bottling party Wednesday night. After closing for the day we sat down with a few pizzas and were joined by friends of the winery, come to add a few more pairs of much needed hands. To efficiently bottle the sparkling wine at any type of speed it takes us eight people. A few more would have been better, but at least we had the critical number.

This is only the second time we have bottled a sparkling wine and while we have some equipment on order to make it easier, right now it's a pretty exhausting and frazzling process. I'm glad that it was only a couple of hundred gallons that had to be bottled.
Gallery: Diary of a Distiller: Chapter 13 - Work hard, play hard

Our line-up of bottlers started with another Jonathan, a husky teen age football player, at the start of the line taking care of bottles. His job is loading and unloading cases of empty bottles, placing them out on a table, and arranging them at Mike's side. Mike was on the filling machine, a huge gadget I like to call The Spaceship, because it looks like a art deco version of one of those old Mercury capsules from the beginning of the space program.

Fred took the filled bottles and rammed in the corks, with Jody doing the same and also dropping the wire cages on top. I wound the cages on with a small spinning device Mike had made. Then I handed the bottles to Jim, Jonathan's dad, who wiped them down, cleaning any spilt wine off. He then passed them to his wife who put the foil covers on and passed them to Joan to be put back in their boxes.

Ramming in the corks is a rough job by hand. Until we get the automatic corking machine we have to use plastic corks and do it by hand, literally. You know how difficult it can be to get the cork out of a bottle of sparkling wine by hand? Imagine putting them in.

Jody had done quite a few when he noticed he was getting bruises and blood blisters on his palms. You would think that he would have noticed sooner, but the wine is bottled very cold, around 27 degrees, and in just a few moments of handling the bottles your hands start to get numb with cold.

So Jody got a glove to help protect his hands a bit. Fred used a rollerblade/skateboard wrist protector and so kept from bruising his hands. Although to get proper leverage he had to stand on a tool box. I guess Fred's slightly vertically challenged.

I had a tough time wiring the cages closed. I have pretty bad chronic bursitis in my elbows and shoulder, forearm muscle pain, and some hand problems going back to injuries and surgery from when I worked on a dairy farm, and when I was a wilderness guide.

I had taken several aspirin before starting and that dulled most of the pain, and the numbness from the cold helped even more. Every now and then I would take one of the bottles and hold it against my forearm and wrist to chill it down and make it feel better. Soon I noticed that my left arm was warm at the shoulder, but as I felt with my right hand down my arm I could feel that it got colder and colder until down at my hand it was icy.

I'm kind of stubborn and I like to get a task done as fast and efficiently as possible, so I bulled along, but I think I learned my lesson and next time I'll take it a bit easier.

The next day my left hand was all blistered and bruised, with both my forearms so sore that I couldn't do much of anything; and now, 36 hours later, typing isn't much fun. I'm not looking forward to almost four hundred miles of driving starting when I finish typing this either, but I keep saying to myself...party...a weekend long party...party...in the Hamptons...pool...beach...girls in bikinis...cocktails...Have a good weekend folks!