blossoming

This is a year of anniversaries and initiations.  Fifteen years at the restaurant, twenty years of marriage, a first vintage of wine.  First real pruning in the vineyard.  First harvest of our own fruit.  First blossoming.   

My work at the restaurant is to tell the stories of the wines I have curated, tales of the landscape, the vineyards, and the people who tend them.  I have long worked to talk about methods of winegrowing and the work that happens in the cellar and how that translates into the glass, how the wine corresponds in an intimate conversation with the food with which it is being served.  I became interested in making wine because I talked so much about the process of making wine and having once studied forms of dance, I felt that to truly understand the alchemy of that process, I had to physically go through the choreography.  Once I had accomplished that, or rather failed in my first few attempts, I understood better something that I have always believed: wine is made in the vineyard and is a true expression of a complete landscape, that notion of terroir being all that encompasses a particular parcel of land from geology to botany, to the microclimate that embraces it, to the varietals that grow on it, to the human hand that husbands it and harvests it into wine.  Little did I know the desire to understand the rhythms of growing  wine would became much greater than the initially planned experiment of simply physically making wine in the cellar (or rather the bathtub as those first few years attested), and that in a three year period, Caleb and I would have a licensed winery with a fledgling vineyard and be producing our first negociant vintage. 

There have been many firsts on this journey and many surprises.  I have gone many times to other vineyards to taste wine and walk the land, to see the vines, to examine the shapes of their trellising.  But these visits exist somewhat in a vacuum.  For me the process is never fully understood until I experience the actual doing of it.  I am envious of two friends who have taken a sabbatical to work at another friend’s vineyard in France.  While they are a bit stunned by the hard manual labor and the difficulties and beauties of a living in a foreign culture, I crave to learn the repeated motions that they practice every day to the protest of their aching bodies.  While I have many mentors in many places willing to discuss the mechanics of the work I must do, I have no one who stands next to me with years of experience  guiding the way the hand prunes the vine here, ties the vine there, thins the shoots here, pulls leaves there.  I have pruned at this friend’s vineyard in France and had his tutelage working forty to ninety year old vines, but I have never pruned two-year old vines, nor have I ever shoot-thinned vines, or pulled leaves.  I have never lifted wires; I have never hedged.  

I have never watched the buds turn to the smallest looking grapebunch you can imagine, or seen how they lengthen and extend with each day until they become the flowers of this majestic and earthy plant with small threads of white pistils coming out of each supposed grape waiting for pollination.  I have never smelled grape blossoms before, the sweet jasmine of the Marquette, or the white pepper of the La Crescent.  I have never witnessed how these scents might translate into the fruit.  I have never noted when blossoming arrives and how long it lasts and if the sun graces the period or if the rain confounds.  This all happens for the first time here and now in this year. 

And there is some sun.  There is rain.  We’ve had strong breezes.  The flowers seem to have pollinated themselves as the pistils fade and the berries begin to grow.  But there are violent thunderstorms while I hide in our bedroom downstairs that is built into the hillside, hide with two cats fearing that the wind will blow the windows in the house out.  I watch out the French doors the hail, pea-sized and so pretty, ride the wind and drop to the ground bouncing like a broken string of pearls.  I find that I pray.  This is the first hail that I have feared.  

In the vineyard, there is cause for alarm.  This is the first time I’ve understood how dispirited a local orchardist felt after losing all the leaves on his apple trees to hail the size of a snowball; without leaves there is no photosynthesis and the plants will die.  This is the first time I understand why the woman in Bordeaux cried when half her fruit near the time of harvest was destroyed by hail.  This is the first time I’ve seen the sly shredding of the leaves and the gaping wounds even in this smallest of fruit.  This will be the first time I will know if the vines can survive this test, if any fruit will remain after all this brutality.  Will the berries just expire, shrivel and blacken, losing their heart after such a defeat?

But grapevines are absurdly resilient.  Only time will tell over these days that turn into weeks.  Already, after a serious of chamomile, yarrow and nettle teas, the vines and fruit seem to respond putting out new growth to replace the damaged leaves, and the untouched berries grow larger covering the holes in the bunches of the berries lost.  They are now about the size of those hail-pearls that caused the chaos in the first place.

This is the first time we think they will survive, and we will still have fruit for our first at home harvest.  This is not the first time, however, this season we have felt hopeful.  And this is not the first time we are a bit wary of that hope knowing that the next scourge or storm could render us hopeless.  Now, there are black caterpillars with white and orange stripes, and a foul infestation of Japanese beetles.  We pick them off the leaves every day, drowning them in old jam jars filled with water and soap.  We collect them and burn them into dust, their scent, rather putrid, perfuming the air.  But that is yet another story.

--Deirdre    

catching (up)

I am sitting in my newly painted studio which has been physically moved for the fourth time in the last thirteen years we have lived here.  This seems to be the fourth and last time.  Ralph Ward, who’s helped us move it every time, laughs and shakes his head at this.  But really, this is the last time.  We’ve dug a spot in to the ground at the top of the rose garden and covered it all in crushed stone, and have started a retaining wall to surround the building.  There are plans to get some paving stone.  Two potted roses sit at the corners of the front of the little house, tall climbing roses, the William Baffins,  that bloom a deep pink and sneak around the windows.  There are plans to plant the roses in the ground once the hardscaping is finished.  Everything about this move is more permanent, more lasting, a little more serious.  Even though after the previous move, we had planted those self-same roses also, and now they’ve  just been dug up and potted again as if they might be more transient.   As I have to water them almost every day, I promise that this situation is temporary.

This is the room that I write in during the summer.  I wrote my book Libation in this space three summers ago though this little house has gone through some changes since then.  It’s original use was as a shelter for two baby lambs bought by the original owners, a structure to protect them from the coyotes that roam down from the spines of the Chateauguay above us.  This is why it’s been dubbed Lamb House.  Last summer, we bought a pull-out couch, so that we could house extra guests, and when the roof failed while those guests were visiting during a series of torrential thunderstorms last August, we decided to have the roof replaced in the fall which gave Lamb House a whole new look—a single shed that is higher at one end of the building giving it the feeling of a cathedral ceiling on the inside.  Just a few weeks ago, Caleb finished putting a window in that upper story, a window from the old library in our village.  It still needs to be cleaned, but the effect is still lovely.  The top half of the building is shingled and barnboard completes the bottom half, just like our house and just like our barn.  Things look more all of a piece now.  

Out my desk window, I see blooming roses: Belladonna, Therese Bugnet, common Rugosa, Foxy Pavement, blooming borage, catmint, tall spires of Valerian in the distance next to the green house which now has a French blue door to reflect the door of the Lamb House, the door of the cantina, and the front door of the main house.  All of a piece, like I said.  There are also the spent blooms of a million iris that need to be dead headed and pockets of bare ground in the beds that need to be weeded, pots of volunteer raspberries that need to be planted. 

We have taken another long sabbatical from writing here, finding that the doing is precluding the writing.  Everything is about catching up and juggling.  In April, we took a break from the restaurant like we always do and took time to do some early work here on the farm.  When we re-opened the restaurant in May, we thought the season would ease into itself as that’s usually the rhythm in our village.  But the restaurant work started off as if in high season, and it has been that way ever since, and somehow doesn’t seem to get easier even with full reinforcements having come to share the work.  On the farm, all the starts that we got going early in the greenhouse are still getting planted—there are so many!—and there has been the planting of new vines, compost preparations, taking care of the apple orchard, shoot thinning, tying up, weeding, planning for trellising, new fence, new orchard, cleaning out the barn for the tasting room, and the list continues, and while there is the satisfaction of crossing off things that do get done, the list seems to grow-every time one task is completed, three more are added. 

There are many things we’d like to write about here this summer: the first blossoming of our vines, the trials and tribulations of trying to grow radicchio, the dishes we make with the ingredients that we are currently harvesting, the élevage of our first wines in the cantina, what is the meaning of a proper lunch, why do we want to grow natural wine and which winegrowers are motivating us to do so, the surprise of finding nine more bottles of our first cider and the plans for a Sunday lunch under our oldest apple tree that those bottles have inspired.  And we hope to be able to meet you here every week or so with these stories, but farm life coupled with restaurant life is often unexpected.  While it has been difficult to sit down at our desks to write here, we have been very good about “micro-blogging” on twitter, and you are welcome to find us there at @paneesalute.  

Here’s to more time to do everything, and to enjoy the doing—

after the party

We sit down at the table.  There are six of us: our friends Mark and Gina who helped the evening stay glued together, Eliza who has been the intern at the restaurant and farm for the last nine months, and her mother Trish, up for a visit.  The old-wood table that Caleb built a few  years ago sits in the middle of the restaurant dining room and feels the weight of all the dishes that have been prepared for own after-the-party dinner: crispy pork, a huge platter of garlic beans, shrimp in black bean sauce, tilapia roasted with lemon grass, red-cooked tofu and coconut tofu, bowls of fresh sliced cucumber, bean sprouts, rice, mint, and basil.

Tonight, Caleb cooked Vietnamese dishes, a collection of recipes from our friend Rebecca’s handmade cookbook from a time she spent in that country, a kind of food he cooks for us in the privacy of our home or at staff dinner.  Tonight, he has cooked these exotic dishes not only for our dinner, but this is what we served to a restaurant packed full of guests who were here to celebrate the launch of a new collaboration between myself and our friends Eleanor and Albert Leger of Eden Ice Cider: an aperitif cider infused with herbs that we have dubbed Orleans.  In this name we wanted something French-sounding to evoke old-world bar magic and something that spoke of place.  Eleanor and Albert live in Orleans County in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont where they produce their silken trio of winter-made ice ciders: Eden, Northern Spy, and a Honey Crisp for Champlain Orchards.

At the table, we are only missing Eleanor and Albert.  They’ve had to return home tonight, a long two hour drive, as tomorrow they have to stop fermentations, and prepare for Albert to return to teaching for the rest of the semester.  They are just doing the kinds of things that winegrowers have to do all the time.  We understand the demands of being cellarmaster, yet we miss them all the same.

We are a little high and a little tired, or a lot tired as I watch Caleb hit the proverbial wall after his day of cooking all this beautiful food, intricate and subtle flavors that weave in and out of the dishes and paired with the somewhat exotic notes of the Orleans in its three different guises tonight: straight-up, with prosecco and lime, and a slightly racy version of a Ramos Gin Fizz, but with the Orleans as the featured player.  The tastes married with the dishes in such a way as to expand and deepen the experience of the food when you put the two together.  

Mark and Gina, who’ve played this game with us before, are the kind of good friends you can call in a pinch when you are in need, and they are there in a flash.  Mark has even been called out of his bed late in the evening to taxi a table of diners visiting from Holland who had walked a couple of miles into town from their inn and thought they could easily get a cab home in our small town of Woodstock.  The skies had unleashed a deluge while they were dining, and there are no cabs.  We were too busy at the restaurant to spare one of ourselves to drive them.  Mark, donning his Brooklyn heritage and persona played the role well, willingly chauffering the visitors to the inn.

Tonight, Gina washed and washed and washed glasses and dishes and forks as they rotated from kitchen and back out to the party.  She wore one of the blue and white striped smocks that Caleb found in a uniform shop in Rome next to a haberdasher for priests and nuns.  It covers her sleek leopard print top and pants which no one ever gets to see as she is in front of the sinks all night.  I’ve asked Mark to tend bar because the third drink is a little complicated and takes time to make, and I know how these events go—there will be other things for me to do—greet guests, dry glasses and ferry them back to the bar, check that there are enough plates and silverware on the buffet, be the expediter.  Eliza is stationed at the buffet serving and talking about the dishes, and Caleb is alternately cooking and checking on guests.  

Of course, I’ve created a rather complicated cocktail for Mark to wade through with many ingredients and long minutes of shaking the shaker while chatting with everyone bellied-up to the bar plus pouring the other drinks while I’m not behind the bar with him.  I could have designed something simpler, but this was the right drink for the right evening, and I’ve never been one to make decisions because it makes life easier.  I’m sure Mark would be able to expound on this if I let him (this is the same man who thinks it would be far more sensible to buy slews of wine glasses each week and recycle them at the end of each night rather than putting up with all the handwashing and polishing we do…), but he is the perfect choice for bartender and soldiers through my demands with style and flair. 

v

There was a buzz, a tangible frisson, on the floor tonight as the build-up of energy slowly rose as more and more people arrived, some from around the corner, some from a couple of hours away, until the hum of conversation and laughter reached pitch.  It was a party, a true celebration, excitement and expectation were as real as featured guests.  But who doesn’t like to have a reason to celebrate?  But even more so, I think the evening was defined by the need for celebration.  We have weathered through a long and very intense winter.  The larger world is in disarray, perhaps more so than usual, and the transition from winter into spring is often painful and homely in northern climes.  The once beautiful snow becomes crusty and dirty losing much of its sparkle and is not much good for anything besides re-adjusting the water table—too icy for skiing, too brittle for snowshoeing, and sometimes dangerous as it melts and causes rise for flood warnings—all a constant reminder that we still have at least six weeks before things really turn around.   It is hard to embrace Winter when she looks spent and rather used.  But the light has changed, it is more clear, more roseate, and softens the harsh reality of mud and discomfort.  Something else undefinable has shifted—Axes?  Or poles?  Or phases of moons or stars or tides?--which has made us buoyant.   

In the dead of winter, the sun goes down at 4:30, and tonight, the light is still filtering in the windows at 7pm.  All around the restaurant we’ve positioned big vases of branches, recent prunings from our plum trees and they are studded with fat green buds.  With the soft light shafting through the space and candles flickering, the golden colors of the Orleans in the glasses, the bright citrus perfumes of lemon and lime, the leafy greens of mint and basil, the voices ebbing and flowing, the heat in the dining room palpable,  the evening shimmers.

We hold onto that shimmer at our own dinner.  It is dark outside now, and almost time to go home just like everyone else.  We raise glasses and tell jokes and talk about vacations.  Someone laughs with abandon.  It is the Ides of March, a craziness that marks a month that comes in like a lion, and supposedly leaves like a lamb, a month of wind and temperament, but also sun and seduction.   We pour Orleans into our glasses for a final good luck toast, and we pour ourselves into this melting and groaning that will eventually lead to Spring—

--Deirdre  

  

pruning

I’ve waited too long to write.  My memory seems to be not quite as it used to be.  In the glory days of youth, I could remember faces, place names, historical dates, addresses(but somehow, never phone numbers), what I ate, drank, when, where, and why. 

I’m trying to remember that sunny day last week.  Ah, yes, it was Wednesday.  A brutally early morning to run errands and attend appointments, then a return home  to that bright sunshine as if this was the beach in southern Italy, or coastal Florida rather than an alpine enclave that comprises our farm.  Sometimes that word does not want to come trippingly off my tongue: farm.  I can’t ignore it anymore, we can’t ignore it anymore, this is a farm, has become a farm, is still becoming a farm.  I think if I say it enough times, quickly enough, it will become like second skin, not even a second thought.  

I never expected to be a farmer.  I’m not entirely sure what I expected, maybe days at the head of a classroom, and that may still come to pass, but I didn’t know that working the land would offer some of the most grueling, heartbreaking, and satisfying work I’ve ever done.  I didn’t know that the work would actually feel like a second skin, almost like intuition.  And that’s the strange thing, we are still so young in this work as farmers (young as in experience, not necessarily in age…)and there is still so much to learn and understand, that when this farming business feels absolutely right, it takes you a bit by surprise.

The sun is beating down, and this is one of my days to prune in the orchard.  Caleb pruned all last week.  I’m strapping on my snowshoes and have one pruners in my back pocket and one in my hand.  The light is so bright and bouncing off the white landscape, I’m wearing sunglasses.   The trees are big enough to be generous bearers of fruit and usually much taller than me.  But with the two feet of snow-pack, I am that much closer to the tops.  But I’ll still have to use a loppers to get at the highest points.

I’ve never pruned our trees before, other than occasionally stealing flowering branches for a bud vase or a floral arrangement in the restaurant.  This is bad behavior.  To prune during flowering is like tying your dog on a very short chain in a dirty yard with no shade and no water, or forgetting your child in the grocery store and driving on home without a care in the world.  I realize as I look at these trees that I will have to stop that behavior.  At least on our own trees.  I will have to pilfer elsewhere.  But that’s always been my modus operandi:  Rose bushes, hydrangea, and peonies in other yards are never safe from my coveting eye, and my snappy sheers.  

Somehow the real, legitimate pruning of our trees has always fallen under Caleb’s purview before this, and because his domain is already quite full, it hasn’t always been easy for him to finish the work.  This year we’re serious about these apple trees, so we are sharing the work.  I’m already nervous about pruning our grape vines come April, even after the patient tutelage of our friend Emanuel in Burgundy this fall, but apple trees are not the same creatures.  Pruning can make or break your plant, it can be the deciding factor between a good season and a bad.   

I’ve taken some time to look at our handy Little Pruning Book: an Intimate Guide to the Surer Growing of Better Fruits and Flowers by F.F. Rockwell and published in 1919.  It’s been reprinted in the Small Farmer’s Journal, Fall, Vol. 33, No. 4.  (There’s that word again: farm. )  Mr. Rockwell has many good things to say about the process of pruning, but he has four points he says to be sure to always keep in mind, and which I carry with me at the ready, just like the extra pruners in my back pocket:

First: always leave a clean smooth cut.  Careless cutting or dull shears, leaving a ragged edge, means slow healing and increased danger—to say nothing about its being the earmark of a slovenly gardener.

Second: Cut just the right distance above the bud.  If you cut close to it, it is likely to be injured.  If you cut too far above it, a dead stub will be left.  On small branches and twigs, cut from a quarter to less than half-an-inch above the bud.  If pruning is done when plants are in active growth, however, the cut should be made close to the bud, as it will heal almost immediately.

Third: Prune above an outside bud.  This will tend to keep the new growth branching outward, giving the plant an open center with plenty of space and light.  While in some specific case there may be reasons for selecting an inside bud, this holds as a general rule.

Fourth: Cut close up to and parallel with the main branch, trunk or stem.  In removing a branch from a tree or side shoots from shrubs or plants, the leaving of a stub, even it if is a short one, delays the healing or makes it possible for disease and germs to enter, thus providing for future trouble.

So, with a fair amount of trepidation, I start.

I take the pruning branch by branch.  I step away occasionally to look at the tree as a whole with the question: is it balanced?  The work goes both slowly and quickly.  There is a meditative quality to the process and Time seems to be neither moving or standing still.  The sun is hot and bright and feels like a balm to cold bones.  The air is fresh and cold and feels like it must be full of the best oxygen.  After a while, I realize I am already on the third tree and any residual fear is gone.  

The snow-covered ground is littered with fallen branches to be collected in bunches.  Some will come inside to be forced for blossoms in vases (old habits die hard….), others will be evaluated for suitability as cuttings, others will be left to dry as wood for cooking.  (Doesn’t pork roasted over  apple wood sound pretty darn good?)

The trees look airy and shaped liked lacy goblets, arms reaching out and up.   When Caleb returns home, he helps me reach the tops I can’t quite get to.  The sun starts to shift.  It’s already three in the afternoon and we have yet to eat lunch.  We decide to stop for the day and catch a bit of sun on the porch with a glass of wine, some salame, little pickles and bread.   We close our eyes to the warmth on our faces and think of bees humming in blossoms in just a few months time, the the fruit ripe on the trees.

--Deirdre

gorgeous disgorgement

We have only a case of bottles left of our first cider from two seasons ago.  They have been patiently waiting, or rather they have been doing what they need to do, and I have been not-so-patiently waiting for the time when we can disgorge them.   The number of bottles has dwindled over the last year and a quarter as they have been victims of my trials and errors.  First, I had hoped to create a sparkling cider in what is known as the ancient method where the second fermentation does not get disgorged before going to market.  This seemed rather easier and had a traditional beauty and insouciance to it.  This can be very tricky though for the unsuspecting  taster who might find an ancient method wine in a wine shop.  Either the bottles will be stored right side up or on their sides and the yeast deposits from the second fermentation will be incorporated into the fluid bubbles of the wine for a more natural beer-like experience (not necessarily a bad thing if the deposits are in minimal proportion), or the bottles must be carefully stored upside down and the unsuspecting taster will perform the final disgorgement.  

There is one producer I know who does this.  He is from Slovenia—Ales Kristancic of Movia--and makes a remarkable sparkling wine from pinot noir--Puro--that arrives here in the United States in a special cardboard box that keeps it upside down.  It is expensive and not for the faint of heart.  In winemaking books, you are often instructed to wear goggles and a heavy jacket at the time of disgorgement, for protection.  This can give you pause.

Our friend Eric who owns Vintages: Adventures in Wine in Concord, Massachusetts showed us the bottle of the Movia on a visit there a couple of years ago when we went down into his cellar to pick a case of interesting and unusual wines.  When I saw the Movia box, and heard Eric’s words of caution, I had to have it.  This would be a wine experience that would truly connect me to the winegrower.  I would be a participant, essentially, in the finishing of the wine.  It is a rather terrific notion if you believe wine connects you to the people with whom you are sharing it, to the dishes with which you drink it, to the landscape that raised it, to the person who tended both the growth of the fruit, and the fermentation and elevage of the wine itself.  It’s a kind of beautiful QED.

We had the wine at Thanksgiving, disgorging the bottle outside the house into a field already covered in snow.  We lost about the a third of the wine, but so relished the minerality of the perlage with just a kiss of blackberry fruit, and of course a faintly yeasty persistence that makes you think of freshly baking bread in a tiny warm bakery on a quiet street corner in early morning mid-winter.  Wine can lead to such kinds of places.

I loved the idea of making our ciders in a similar fashion and engaging its drinkers in the same ritual.  

We began by picking an assortment of our Liberty apples here on the farm along with our wild pippins.  We added heaps of Empires from Caleb’s parents’ grand and old apple tree that offers up bushels of fruit each year.  Before we had a proper cantina, the cider of that year fermented with its own wild yeasts rather zealously in a cool corner of the living room, popping its airlock off and foaming at the mouth as it were.  It continued to ferment on its lees for a couple of months, and finally it settled down by the holidays and went into that quiet period of deep winter.  I kept it on its fine lees.  In early March, we went to go visit a friend’s family farm where they make old-style cider just for themselves, a tradition handed down from father to son to father to son.  We tasted incredible three year old ciders that had been aged in whiskey or ginger barrels.  Kermit, the grandfather, had told us that the longer cider stays in the barrel the better.  And that it doesn’t start to show its true self until after three years, and gets really good at six years.  He also told us that the cider works twice a year in the barrel, fermenting again in the spring and in the fall.

Sure enough, on the spring equinox our cider started to ferment again.   Tides, shifts in season and sky, do actually have an effect on the living organism that is wine.   Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.  

Mid-summer, I decided to start the second fermentation in bottle.  I too wanted to go old-school, so just added a simple syrup of natural sugar.  We stirred, bottled, and corked with mushroom caps and the traditional cages.  About a month later, our friends from Burgundy were visiting and we were tasting each other’s wine, and  I brought out a bottle of the cider to try.  The flavors were well coalesced, but the sparkle was somewhat disappointing.  It still tasted like a base wine.  In consultation with another friend who has a vineyard about fifteen minutes from us and who’s experimented a lot with sparkling wines, I decided to add another dosage to my bottles.  This time with a little neutral yeast.  The sparkle had increased a little more from the sugar by the day I opened all the bottles and recombined them in a large demijohn in order to add the yeast, but because this was my first time making sparkling cider, I really wanted it to sparkle, and I wanted to explore all the possibilities of production.  All along, I left some of the lees from the initial fermentation in the cider.  Depth of flavor and all that.  I would be making this for real in another year.

We riddled the bottles three times a week, and I left them on their sides.  We began to open bottles every few months, to see how the cider would develop.  It developed.  It definitely had sparkle now.  Perhaps too much.  I should have been more patient with my initial dosage of sugar.  But now I had bottles with a thick carpet of lees at the bottom that would churn up with the mousse whenever we opened one.  This wasn’t quite the experience I was looking for, so that’s when we decided to disgorge.  

We thought a winter disgorgement would be elegant and easy.  All that snow and cold weather seemed to beckon for something so festive, and a good use of the season.  I had inverted all the bottles at the holidays to get the lees into the necks.  The date for disgorging in January kept getting pushed back due to other necessities, until this past week.  After a brutal cold snap, we had some milder weather.  Out went what was left of the bottles, necks down into snow.  Two to three hours, they say, for partial freezing of the necks at 21-25 degrees Farenheit.  We waited.  We waited some more.

So here’s the thing.  Snow is an insulator.  That’s why we’re so happy we have it burying our vines during all this cold weather.  The snow stayed at a consistent 31 degrees.  No freezing of the necks.  And no disgorgement.  We went to work at the restaurant, knowing that it was going to get colder out that night.  We thought we’d return to disgorge at around one in the morning.  Again, elegant and easy.  A good story.

Arriving home, it was indeed colder.  About 15 degrees.  Perfect! we thought.  And even more perfect when our handy little digital thermometer read 23 degrees in the snow.  However, the bottoms, so gallantly sticking up in the air, were partially frozen, and the necks were not.   Caleb had the brilliant idea of shoveling snow on top of all the bottles to keep them protected from the further freezing until we could look at this situation square in the eye the next morning.  

The next day, the snow was still just the right temperature.  There was still ice in the base of the bottles, so we uncovered them to let the sun warm them a bit.  We decided to disgorge.

We dressed in heavy coats and thick glasses.  Caleb valiantly managed the popping of the corks and trying to hold as much of the cider in the bottles after the yeast had shot out of the bottles.  I took over with settling the bottles and setting them up inside to warm a little before topping up and corking.  Again, I think my overzealousness with the yeast has resulted in a less successful integration of the co2 in the bottle.  The nose of the cider was apply, yeasty, spicy, and the taste on the palate the same.  We let the bottles come to a warmer temperature in the house, all lined up on the dining table, and topped the bottles up with itself rather than a sugar liqueur that many Champagne houses employ.  We like the dry element of the cider.  But I worry a bit about the absence of fruit.  Is it there or not there?  The taste an aroma of apples is fleeting.

Re-corked, and re-caged, the bottles will age for at least another two months.  My hope is that the yeastiness will meld into the cider in a pleasing way, rather than a “look-at-me” kind of way.  One of the wines I made from the same year also had that yeasty, nuttiness at the finish for the longest time.  Until Christmas this year, and it has clearly been the best wine I have made to date.  It just needed time.

So this initial foray into the world of sparkling ciders also needs time.  There are only 8 bottles left, so I will have to choose carefully the tasting occasions.  We will go back to the drawing board.  Read and talk to other growers producing sparkling wines.  What will I do with the ciders that are gently still fermenting in the cantina as we speak?  I await the arrival of several ciders and poires(pear ciders) to taste from the imitable Eric Bordelet.  One of my mentors  had recently told me about Eric’s ciders, and that his poire Granit was one of the greatest fermented beverages on earth.  I await their arrival, and practice patience. 

--Deirdre

At least I grew a carrot

See? I really did grow a carrot.  Some of them were what I call ‘paradigm specimens’, what a carrot should be.  And for a four-by-eight foot bed, there were a lot of carrots. The same was true for the scallions, and the curly endive, and for… well, that’s just about where paradigm perfection ended this year in my garden.  Everything else was an exercise in rescue and salvage, once I realized that I had made some kind of mistake, or neglected to do something at a particular moment.  Don’t get me wrong; a lot of great produce came out of our beds, but as the season advanced I began to see that it could have been so much better.  Sometimes things go well in your garden and you don’t know why, but not for me, not in this year of no forgiving.  So, in an effort to begin some catalogue of my lessons learned, for future reference, I offer a list of this year’s mistakes.

1.      1.  I didn’t water enough.  Sometimes it rains with some frequency over several days, or even weeks, up here in the summertime, and a garden can be quite content to hold its own with short frequent rains.  But that’s not what this past summer was like, and I was finding other things to do in the garden by day and thinking that ‘if it doesn’t rain today or this evening, I’ll water when we come home tonight after work.’  After all, watering the garden beds at night is really the best for the plants.  But after service at the restaurant, I would either forget or postpone watering in favor of getting horizontal; and that is the reason I offer.  In return, the plants offered me no excuse.  Instead, they punished me.  The lettuces and chicories quickly took on a tougher texture , and—get this—everything stopped growing!   And when I finally got the message and started watering every day, even just a little bit, and sometimes even in the middle of a frightfully sunny and hot day…by golly, the plants got together and decided that was all right with them, and got right back to growing and looking fabulous.  Amazing, isn’t it?

2.     2.   I procrastinated.  On almost every job, I probably procrastinated at least a little bit.  “Oh, I need to do that over there as soon as possible, but I’m doing this now, and I’ll get to that just as soon as I finish this.”  Yeah. Great. Except that I procrastinated before doing the current task, and the fact is that I am already playing catch-up to my plants.  As my Mom used to say, ‘Get on the stick!’ ‘Don’t put it off!’ ‘It needs to be done!’  Well said, Mom.  I’ll try to do better.

3.     3.  I sowed some things too densely and was too wussy about thinning them aggressively.  Even lettuces need personal space.

4.      4.  I didn’t give the plants that want lots of space enough.  Therefore, my plan for 2011 is to move the zucchini, cucumbers, and other squashes ‘offsides’ to the vineyard side of the moat (the ditch that drains the storm runoff from the road and which separates the vineyard from the yard), in other words, into the field proper, like real farmers do it.  This means I can then use their old space for the greens which need more space themselves.

5.      5. Further to nos. 3 and 4: I need to start more things in flats so that I can use my beds and my time more efficiently by spacing the transplants correctly and weeding less.  This will require no procrastinating.

6.      6. I will learn how to properly prune a tomato plant so that I don’t have to hunt for fruit, and so that the plant can devote more energy to the fruit.  It seems that when I ask the plant to grow longer and produce another bunch of fruits, I am really just being greedy, and then end up with less.

7.      7. I need to be more aggressive about succession-planting the wild arugula.  Cutting it back and asking for more than 2 harvests per season from the same bed just seems to require more time picking individual leaves, instead of mowing a bagful with the scissors in 3 minutes.  Therefore, I will stop procrastinating and sow another 2-by-8 foot space at 4-week intervals, and I will sow the designated 4-by-8 foot space in the hoop house in the first half of August, and another in the first half of September.  

8.     8.  I will try growing some more potatoes.  The few I tried last year were excellent (once I found them under the tendrils of the Delicata squash vines).

9.      9. I think I am beginning to understand basil just a little bit.  Let me correct that to: “I wonder if...”  My basil plants really struggled in their raised bed in the lower garden.  The last-chance salvage basil I planted in a pot took off and flourished in soil of the same quality, but wasn’t shaded by the pole bean trellis, as the bed-basil was.  Therefore, I will try some more basil in pots this year (for the sake of convenience and ornament on the retaining wall), and I will hold my basil starts a little longer in the hoop house before transplanting, and I will transplant half of the bed basil to a bed where they will have full, and half to the shade of the bean trellis, just to see what happens.  May be I will learn something.  Oh, and I will water more.  This means that I will have to ‘get off my duff,’ as my Mom would say.

  

1..  10.   I pray that I am beginning to understand radicchio just a little bit.  This year I will start more Treviso and Chioggia in flats, and I will transplant them on their correct leaf-day (see the Old Farmer’s Almanac or Maria Thun’s Biodynamic calendar), and I will space them correctly. And! Yes, I will water more when needed.

Well, it’s December 30^th, and those are my Resolutions for the New Gardening Year.  Tune in next year for a brutal review of my efforts.  Let me apologize in advance to my Mom for my shortcomings in 2011.  Whoops!  Sorry Mom!  See you in the garden! 

--Caleb