Gill of Wine

I just had the extreme pleasure of a visit by Francois Witasse and his wife (excuse me for not getting her name) and young son. Francois is the Directeur General for Tonnellerie Demptos in Bordeaux. They do quite a bit of business with our local cooper, McGinness Wood Products and were in the area paying them a visit. So Tina McGinness brought them by to see a local winery. What delightful people and wonderful appreciation of wines. Always fun to show off our wares to someone who can appreciate them without bias. Not much time, now, but just wanted to get a post started… more on the visit later.

Looks like a misspelling, but it’s my name for a grape found growing here at Peaceful Bend.

This guy seems to just want to be wine. It is a volunteer vine located near our crush pad. Most years, the majority of it’s crop makes it through to harvest, without any intervention whatsoever. This alone makes it a great candidate for cultivation. It has a relatively small berry, similar to Norton, but the tannins are considerably higher, which really sparks my interest, and spawned the name.

Yesterday marked the completion of the rough filtration of all our wines from the cold stability process.
This year, about 7,000 gallons passed through the filter, and 8,000 gallons were moved (1k of reds were just racked and not filtered, which constitutes the majority of the work; detartrating tanks!

Everything went quite well. One major note I wanted to make: a 1.5″ triclover “T” placed at the intake of the filter greatly aided the process several ways:

Pump Priming

Bypass filter to fill dosing tank or place lees in dosing tank

This is a project we’ve been working on this winter. The wine will only be available at the Hy-Vee store at Lake of the Ozarks. But more than anything, I was just wanting to test the image upload function of the new version of WordPress.

…. for being trapped in the salesroom. Had some nice customers. One of the better thing about the off season (doesn’t seem near as off as it use to be!) is that the customers that do show up are high quality. Sometimes I wonder if we structured things properly around here; I often joke about not having a salesroom personality, but it really is enjoyable and instructive. Nothing like getting the poop from the horse’s mouth! That didn’t really sound right, did it. Anyway, sold some cases, had some great conversation, and rested my weary bones from the end of the week’s work.

Also did some good IT work. Last month I started studying SEO from Cricket and with that tagged onto some tech groups that are just chalked full of good info. I had been shopping for good defenseware (you read that first here, cuz I just made it up) and Martha’s site recommended Eset. So the trial version is running on all our boxes now.

Also worked on a little in-house project: setting up a little php program that I wrote this winter so that it emails confirmations when data gets entered. Not quite finished yet, but did get this php library installed and functioning. Now to integrate it seamlessly into the program.

Tho the rest has done me good, I’m getting antsy to get back into the cellar to continue the wine work. Was able to get 1,000 gallons of Catawba through the filter on Wednesday, AND all the tanks cleaned (the biggest task of the operation, beyond getting everything setup) but was interrupted on Thursday by a truck with 15 pallets of bottles!

Lots has gone down since my last entry. The least of which not being that I’ve moved all websites to a new server. This took quite some time and effort and has put me way behind on many things, including keeping up with my stuff on the web.

Recently, the wines been calling me back. I started filtration of the wines out of cold stability, then 15 pallets of bottles arrive yesterday. And today I had salesroom duty. Will do the salesroom tomorrow too, but this is restful stuff, and I hope to be able to knock out some more wine in the morning before the salesroom is open. All is pretty much set to go.

Anyway, this blog was broken since I moved it, and a lull in the salesroom allowed me to get it going again. Hopefully, it all works ok. I notice some missing picks that were uploaded to via the blog…. good reason not to do it that way. Also noticed a bunch of “A”s with hats added. What’s with that. A bit distracting, but everything basically looks to be intact. Hoping to do more fun blogging here. Awhile back I setup a blog on our intranet for detailed winemaking to keep from putting people to sleep here.

Decided to find some links that describe the 2012 event without a religious slant.

Here’s a nicely done one.

http://www.acalan.com/event2012.htm

It’s easy to find lots of “talk” on the subject, but unfortunately, much of it is cluttered with apocolyptic views.

The ground was saturated with the nice rains and snows this winter, including a recent 2 inches of sleet that was like walking in a bunch of beads. Then we got an inch and half of rain with a couple hours on the night of Feb. 16/17 according to Wudack.

Recently, I got in trouble on a discussion forum for starting a thread with this title. Actually, the way that others ended up interpreting the situation, it was Sean who got in trouble. I would have rather it be. Not because I’m some kind of martyr, but because after thinking about this long and hard, I think he was probably more correct than me. But my first intentions were good ones, and I did think I was staying within the rules. However, by definition, someone misconstrued my intentions and therefore, by definition (DO NOT discuss anything that can be even remotely construed as political or religious talk. ) I broke the rules. I can only think that my side was sided with because of the good, no great, joke that was included!

So anyway, here’s why I didn’t feel that my subject was religious, but simply philosophical: The event that correlates with the time posted in the subject line is an astronomical event. There’s some serious celestial alignment about to happen in less than five years, and it was first known to be noticed by the Maya people quite some time ago. That some modern Zealots have taken this under their wing to be Armageddon is their own business. Some of those same people would be just as ready to claim that any particular rainstorm is a deliberate Godsend, especially if it does damage to their home. But does that make a rainstorm into a religious subject. Not in my book. Consequently those same people tend to “thank the Lord” for saving them, instead of bitching at him for tearing their house down in the first place. Mind you I do neither of those actions.

I’ve invited the participants and viewers of the forum to this thread on my site* , as I am not in fear of a discussion of a very interesting event that might be considered to be religious by some.

You, of course, are invited to comment or ignore, but I thought my explanation was more appropriately place in my own space.

*which by the way, involves a whole other mixed bag of emotions… I’ve never invited anyone here except winemakers or perl writers; the winemakers most likely did not recognize this as the default template of wordpress, an I’m pretty sure the perl geeks don’t care! But I did build a template for our main site, and have always been a bit more focused on content then glitz. But perhaps I should be more embarrassed about my scant content! But hey, I’ve had wine to make!

Zipped Mr. Cellar Files Updated February 13, 2008

After spend the past couple of weeks attempting to get an instance of mc working on a Linux (Ubuntu) box, time has run out for the time being and it’s become important to get mc running, so I’ve switched back to setting up a winXP box to host mc. Once again, this blog will become a station for documenting the process and related, hopeful, progress. I’ll also jot a few notes down about what I learned working with Linux and the VR portion of mc.

Here’s a list of tasks (completed as of this writing) required for setup:

Update XP with special interest in having sp2 installed before snooping around the net much.

7 zip (recommended for unzipping jpgraph)

perl activestate

pm needed**:

db_file (for mh version 2.103)

gd-graph will also load gd

DBI:

Xampp (can now use php5 with latest version of jpgraph)

note that latest version of xampp (dec. 2007) has a slight bug in it and requires this to be downloaded also: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=32bc1bee-a3f9-4c13-9c99-220b62a191ee&displaylang=en

run xampp_setup

digitemp*

jpgraph* (new version just released earlier this month works with php5)

misterhouse:

create folder c:\misterhouse

create folder c:\misterhouse\mycode

open \mh\bin\mh.ini and save it as \mh\bin\mh.private.ini

edit mh.private.ini :

code_dir = $Pgm_Root/code/test, c:/misterhouse/mycode

voice_cmd = MSV4

cm11_port= com2

ibutton_cycle_minutes=10

lat 37deg 58 min

lon 91 25

latitude = 37.9833
longitude = -91.4176

remove test_x10.pl and mytest.pl from ./code/test AND

remove all items via web interface misterhouse home>setup mr house>Edit Items (must be same time as removing the above modules before restarting or it’ll crash)

ini editor>web>web_refresh (remove: meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”600;url=/misc/photos.shtml” /) [stops pictures]

dbi:mysql settings???

I also downloaded VNC Real to make working much more comfortable (from my laptop on the sofa!) Access Control set for +192.168.0.100/255.255.255.255

Failed to remember that CYGWIN is required to run digitemp. Also need to add CYGWIN to the user define PATH in xp. will elborate as time allows…. in a bit of hurry right now..

Note to self (you didn’t think all this was here just for you!) Serial driver for dual serial pci card is in G:\serialDRivers\ITD\IT887x

**perl modules are installed via a program call ppm, which is started from a command prompt (start/run/cmd) BE SURE TO CHANGE VIEW TO ****ALL**** PACKAGES. (yelling at self at 5:00 am after spending hours trying to download and install db_files.pm)

*unzipping these was a two step process: first one created a zip file from gz zip file