Grape Daze

What felt like a brief, blitheringly hot end to summer was apparently enough to produce a huge amount of grapes, and I mean an huge amount, on a small vine in my grandparent's garden.  They weren't entirely ripe however, and we spent a couple of days agonising about whether to pick them or not, but when it started raining we decided to give in and pick the lot before they went to the bad...

bucket full'a grapes

But what to do with such a large quantity of on average slightly under ripe grapes I hear you cry, and the answer is of course, to squash them!  We're making wine.

So, let the squishing begin!
But first the tedious sorting through of the grapes. yay. So we spent what felt like several hours removing the "unsound" grapes from the rest (unsound being the word they use in the wine making book we used)

And with the tedious sorting came what I am going to refer to as The Grape Daze - capital T, G and D.  After a while sorting through these grapes my mind was starting to, shall be say, search around for distraction in just about any form

1) bug containment

Strictly speaking this wasn't my mind wandering, it was just me being generally unwilling to see silly little insects turned into wine, so we a big bucket for unsound grapes and into this bucket also went several earwigs, a multitude of spiders, slugs and about a million snails.  And these snails are little tiny baby snails so it is quite easy to, in ones valiant attempts to rescue said stupidly small snails, squash them instead.  Which is why we lost several good grapes to the cause - it turns out it's easier just to pick of the grape that the snail is on. Something worth remembering I think.

2) a fixation over the word "inverted"

Now don't ask me how this got started, but after a while I couldn't get the word out of my head. Inverted, inverted, in-vert-ed. INVERTED. I started wondering whether you could vert something.  I feel an example is necessary...

Imagine, you are walking along (stick with me here) you see a beetle (or a tortoise if you prefer).  The beetle (or tortoise) is on the ground in front of you, on it's back - it's little legs are flailing and it looks as mournful as a maggot just lying there on it's back.  So being a generally nice person that doesn't like to see others suffering for no reason you vert it. Putting it back the right way up, it waddles away happily to it's beetle (or tortoise) family.  Hooray verting saves the day.

ehem, or something like that - unfortunately I looked it up, and vert is not a verb - but it should be, just like the singular of sheep should in fact be shoop.

I think this whole thing may have been a by-product of the bug rescuing.

 



3) Graphs

I started to mentally makes graphs of what we were doing and how long it took to do it. No joke.  I think this is some kind of sign that I've been doing to much statistics.  Or maybe it's just my mind being strange at a time of intense tedium.  I don't know.

I've drawn out some of them for some reason - here you go, mock me if you dare! ;)










4) The pomegranate seed

This was perhaps the most bizarre of all, and it occurred towards the end of the squashing process itself. I had, earlier on in the day been eating a pomegranate, (fascinating right?) and my dad found a seed on the worktop, so he squeezed it into out increasingly full vat of grape juice.   Not too strange so far, but then came this strange little scene, where in the future we're world famous wine makers and people are begging us for the secret, and it's that in every bottle there is the juice of one single pomegranate seed.  It was a bit of a Black Books everyone-said-I-was-mad-moment.  (I can't find a clip on youtube so if you don't know what I'm talking about you're going to have to watch Black Books, Grapes of Wrath episode or forever be tormented with not understanding my little story)

Any way, the product of this strange afternoon were four rather disconcertingly brown coloured gallon bottles of grape juice. I am assured the brown will settle, otherwise we have jsut made pure liquid brown (as opposed to pure green) and this is going to be the most unappetisingly coloured wine ever made.