Category: Cooking

From Noah.org

I found a couple of articles by this guy, Alastair Bland. Very inspirational stuff.

The bicycle vintner

How to make your own wine – and end up with great glutes too. By Alastair Bland

'AND THE WINE ," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson during his time in the Napa Valley, "is bottled poetry."

Such reverence for wine has not been lost on the modern connoisseur, who considers it a miraculous potion, gently holding the glass and lifting it against the light to admire the shade of the vintage before taking a sip, ever so small. The connoisseur has spent lots and lots of hours training and refining a delicate palate and can detect just the slightest essences, which might be named raspberry, earth, cherry, smoke, oak, spice, vanilla, citrus, pine, hickory, peach, cinnamon, gooseberry, and anything else that sounds lovely to the ear. Wine: "It's the nectar" – as the connoisseur loves to say – "of the gods."

The process of making wine, however, is quite foul, if not offensive. The vintner infects some grape juice with a form of mold called yeast, and this stuff promptly goes to work eating the sugar. The cells go wild, feasting and producing alcohol and reproducing like bunnies until they all choke on their own excrement and perish at once. The poisoned corpses sink to the bottom, and with that the nectar is ready to drink.

I am by no means a connoisseur of wine. I have, however, made wine at home, and last fall I even produced several gallons during a two-month bicycle tour of California. To save money on my trip, I never bought food. I cycled up and down the Central Valley, living peacefully off the land. Fig, almond, and apple trees could easily be found growing wild in roadside ditches, but if I saw a tree sagging with fruit but on the other side of a fence, all I usually had to do was knock on the door of the nearest farmhouse and ask permission to pick some. The people I met were remarkably friendly, and many times they brought out ladders and buckets and picked fruit by my side. Acquiring free grapes was just as easy.

In camp – be it at a state park or behind a haystack – I crushed my grapes by hand and dribbled the juice into a plastic screw-top jug. Then I added a pinch of bread yeast from a small sack I carried, screwed on the cap, and called it a sealed deal. Contained in their warm world of sweetness, my yeast cell friends were immeasurably happy. They partied and feasted day after day in the plastic jug as I pedaled down the country roads of California. Often I had to loosen the cap a tad to release the pressure, and I'd say to my boisterous friends, "Now, now, kids. Don't get too wild."

But they never really listened. At night when it cooled down, so would the yeast, but at sunrise the debauchery started up again. Such a lifestyle can only last so long, and after about a week my single-celled travel companions would all die quite suddenly of alcohol poisoning.

Tragic perhaps, but this was not an occasion to mourn. Behind an old barn at dusk, I would kick off my shoes, strain the warm wine through a clean sock, stretch out my legs, and drink. Often the wine still bubbled slightly like cider – and it never let me down. It tasted good, in fact, and several times I got totally plastered before sinking into a deep slumber beneath the stars. Ah, wine: bottled poetry and the nectar of the gods.

I traveled 2,500 miles on my tour of California, from San Francisco to Redding, south to Los Angeles, then north again, and through it all I saw no place so beautiful as the Napa Valley. In the quaint little town of St. Helena one sunny day in October, I pulled up to a fashionable-looking roadside winery with a sign in front that read, "Free Tasting – Come on in!" I parked my vehicle outside, removed my helmet, and staggered in the door.

My eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, and in a moment I beheld a half dozen wine tasters standing at the counter, delicately swirling their long-stemmed glasses, immersed in thought, surely trying to give a name to that oh-so-slight essence. Several pairs of eyes turned upon me, and I felt suddenly out of place in this society of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen. Yet they all smiled warmly at me, and one of three lovely damsels standing together at the counter commented, "Nice day for a bike ride."

"Even better day for some wine," I retorted.

"What can I get you?" the man behind the counter asked.

"Anything – just make it strong and on the rocks."

He chuckled and poured me an itty-bitty little portion of red wine. "This," he said proudly, "is what I like to call our nectar of the gods."

I took a sip. "Mm, the gods, indeed. But now you've got to try some of mine." I thudded my sticky half-gallon bottle onto the counter and explained that it was five-day-old bike booze, made from grapes I'd pulled down from the top of a huge fig tree by Lake Berryessa. The lovely damsel asked what varietal the grape was, and I said, "Why, I don't know." I suggested that she have a taste and decide for herself. I loosened the cap and swirled the bottle. A potent aroma filled the air. She giggled nervously and said she would rather die.

"Come on, now. About a million of my friends sacrificed their lives to make this stuff. I think you should do them the honor." I held out the bottle, but the people stared at me in shock. "Um ... " I stammered. "I'm just kidding, of course." Still, the folks eyed me with suspicion.

I wasn't really offended. After all, I resembled a vagrant, and my wine looked disgusting; I hadn't filtered it yet, and there'd been no time for it to age. On the other hand, this was the real thing – wine at its most rustic stage – and I thought it was a poor connoisseur who was afraid of sampling something so pure and fresh.

I entered a half-dozen tasting rooms that afternoon, yet I met no one daring enough to even smell my concoction. I camped alone that night in the quiet oak forest of Bothe State Park. I ate walnuts, prickly pears, and the inevitable figs for supper, then began sipping what would be my last bottle of bike booze. I'd noticed that day as I pedaled along that all the local vineyards had been stripped clean. To the commercial wine-makers, this was just another stage in the calculated process of putting poetry into a bottle. To me, though, the barren vines alluded to the end of the season, the coming of winter, and the time for me to steer toward home.

No one else in eight weeks of travel ever tasted my wine, and it's all I can do now to provide the instructions for others to make it. To anyone interested in making their own booze during their next wine-country bicycle tour, I say: do not be daunted. The materials are few, the process simple, and if you just put some heart into it, the results will be bottled poetr– well, at least it'll rhyme. Bicycle wine: a recipe

You will need

A bicycle - Mine is an Outback, a mountain bike, made in Canada and purchased second-hand in La Paz, Mexico. It is gray, has 21 speeds, and has been outfitted with three rusty baskets – one up front and two in the rear. It's a cool yet economical setup.

Grapes - Any sort will do, and you can still tell the connoisseurs that your wine is a pinot noir or a syrah or whatever because bike wine is always so rustic that no expert – should they dare taste it – could even hope to distinguish the true varietal of grape.

Yeast - A pinch of brewer's yeast is preferable, but bread yeast will do the trick as well. (In prisons, you might note, the vintners among the inmates make "pruno" using common bread mold.)

A plastic jug with a screw-on cap.

A clean sock.

A small, clean Tupperware container.

The process

Step 1. Smash the grapes by hand in the Tupperware container.

Step 2. Pour the juice into your plastic jug. A few seeds and skins mixed in with the juice will not hurt the quality of the wine. (Note: few things, in fact, can hurt the quality of this wine.) Discard the pulp.

Step 3. Drop a pinch of yeast into the jug and seal the cap loosely.

Step 4. Let your yeast cell friends go to work. They will enjoy themselves immensely, having sex and eating sugar and making a big frothy mess of everything – but you should not get angry at them; they'll be dead in a week, so let them have their fun.

Step 5. When the wine has ceased bubbling, filter it through your sock into your Tupperware. Now wash out the jug, pour the wine back in, seal the cap, and drink at will. (Note: the wine will still be relatively thick – but this is bike wine, and there is nothing to be done about it.)

--Alastair Bland is a writer who lives in San Francisco. His piece on homemade wine, "The Bicycle Vintner," appeared in the Bay Guardian March 9.

Bike Booze

by Alastair Bland Dirt Rag, issue: 116, Issue Date: 08.15.2005

Cycling on steep mountain trails will beat you up and wear you down. Through a long day of such activity, there is no better medicine than water to keep the athlete’s body functioning at its optimum level.

Yet, wine has its rightful place in the realm of trail-riding. Many times on wild mountain roads I have yearned for a drink, not of water, but of something powerful, thick, and red. How convenient it is, then, that wine can actually be made in the course of a bicycle trip.

I am an expert in this matter, for I have studied wine, and I have studied bikes. I have also made wine, and I have also ridden bikes. And last autumn, these two beautiful worlds collided. Actually, they meshed very gracefully, and in little time I became a very capable bicycle vintner.

I pedaled around the state of California on my old 21-speed for eight weeks and 2500 miles. This was in September and October—harvest time. I rode quiet farm roads along the Southern California coast, in the Central Valley, and in the famous Napa Valley, where some of the best wine in the world comes from, or so I have read in glossy-covered, hoity-toity magazines. Grapes have been growing in these regions for over a hundred years, and now there are so many vineyards across the state that it makes one who has seen these vast plantations wonder that the entire world can consume so much wine. There is such a glut of grapes, in fact, that they have overflowed from the vineyards and rooted themselves along riverbanks, in forests, and along quiet country roads.

And that is where the bicycle vintner wants to go. It is most prudent to hunt grapes far from the beaten track, since on the side of a busy highway passing motorists will look on in wonder or concern as the bicycle vintner climbs into a roadside tree to pull down his grapes, and things will get ugly if the county police are called to the scene. There may be accusations of thievery, and if the cop discovers that the cyclist is traveling the highway with a jug full of an alcoholic beverage, well, it’s all over.

The flat, farm-grid dirt roads of the Sacramento Valley are lined with feral grapevines. More refreshing to the mountain biker, however, are the hilly routes through the oak forests of Napa and Sonoma counties, but wherever one rides, one must watch the roadsides carefully. Grape clusters do not necessarily hang voluptuously from fences or branches; the bunches of fruit may rest on the ground, totally eclipsed by vegetation. In such cases, the grape leaves will be the only tip-off, so the grape hunter must learn their shape, size, and color.

Seven or eight pounds of grapes, squeezed by the hand of a bicyclist, will render a half gallon of juice. Just a pinch of brewer’s yeast from a small foil packet will subsequently render a half-gallon of wine. It will take a week, however, for the juice to ferment completely, so the bicycle vintner must be ready to do some camping. A rear bike rack for carrying gear, as well as at least one sizeable travel basket for the wine jug, are essential to the bicycle vintner.

The wine jug should be of plastic, and the cap should be loosely sealed. Several times each day, it must be loosened and the pressure inside relieved, for millions of yeast cells are presently having an epic orgy of sex, sugar, and booze – and carbon dioxide steadily bubbles from the living soup. Thus, the plastic bottle, bouncing around in the back of your bicycle, is potentially a very powerful explosive. You have been warned.

But soon enough the yeast cells will die. They die of exposure to their own raw sewage matter. This is the stuff humans are interested in, which we like to consume, and which we have named alcohol. Alcohol results when yeast cells eat sugar, and once the level of alcohol by volume reaches 12 or 13 percent, the cells perish, and it is time for the bicycle vintner to drink. Now, it may be fun – indeed, it is fun, for I have done it – to drink the wine while pedaling down the road, but this is obviously foolish behavior. Besides, a more pleasant time will be had in camp. Here, one can kick off his shoes after the long hard day and rest at a comfortable picnic table, in the shade of the trees, with a loaf of bread, and the jug of fresh, un-aged bike booze.

Do not doubt the power of bike booze. It may look like innocent grape juice, but that is just a guise. You may get buzzed, tipsy, drunk, and even sick off this stuff. If you have made a full half gallon, it should last several days.

As soon as you can, start another batch. Take advantage of the seasonal bounty, for the grapes will not last long. The bicycle vintner, like the conventional vintner, works from the months of August through October – that’s all. This is called “crush time.” Then, come November, the countryside turns orange, the leaves fall, and the land sinks into its long, winter depression.

Ah well, spring always comes again, then summer, and meanwhile the grapes fill out and grow heavy. If the conventional vintner, with his farm tractors and big wine vats and tasting rooms and hoity-toity clientele– if he does not make use of these grapes, they are free for the bicycle vintner.

Just beware of the county cops, and never—almost never—drink and ride.

To Make Bike Booze You Will Need

• A bicycle. A mountain bike, with beefy tires and a sturdy frame, is best for the bicycle vintner. Otherwise, I have no further recommendations.

* Grapes. Any kind will do, and the wine can still be labeled as zinfandel or merlot or pinot noir as you wish, for the final product is so rustic that few connoisseurs, no matter how sophisticated and hoity-toity, would ever be able to distinguish the actual variety of grape.

• Yeast. A foil packet of brewer’s yeast can be bought for a buck at any home-brew supplies shop.
• A plastic jug with a screw-on cap.
• A clean sock.
• A small, clean Tupperware container.

Step by Step

• Smash the grapes by hand in the Tupperware container.
• Pour the juice into your plastic jug. A few seeds and skins mixed in with the juice will not hurt the quality of the wine. (NOTE: Few things, in fact, can hurt the quality of this wine.) Discard pulp.
• Drop a pinch of yeast into the jug and seal the cap.
• Let the brew ferment. It will bubble and froth violently, and to avoid a messy explosion the cap must be loosened several times per day to release the pressure.
• After five or six days—when it has ceased bubbling—filter the wine through a clean sock into your Tupperware. Then wash out the jug and pour the wine back in, seal the cap, and drink at will. (NOTE: The wine will still be relatively thick—but this is bike booze, and there is nothing to be done about it.)\