Tag: Wine Making

I’m in the process of making wine and it occurred to me, wine and writing have much in common! I’m not referring to drinking wine while writing – though that works well sometimes too. What I am referring to is the wine making process. Here’s why:

1)    Ingredients
Like all the ingredients that go into wine making, so do many pieces go into building a story. We all start with an idea, then another idea, then as the story is thought out, many ideas – all going into one masterpiece.

2)    Mix it all together
For wine, yeast is added. For writing, throw in some catalyst ideas to make things interesting. Mix it all up….juggle the ideas around….start writing!

3)    Take a reading
A tool is used for wine – a hydrometer. It measures sugar content to track how sugar is being converted to alcohol. What tools do we use as writers? There are many out there. Read what has been written and think about where the story is going. I like to write all my ideas and let the story guide me. Other writers may use outlines. This step is to evaluate the next steps in the story.

4)    Let it sit
The 1st draft of the story is complete. The wine is fermenting nicely – now time needs to take over to do the job.

5)    Racking
After a period of time, it’s time to rack the fermenting wine to another vessel. This removes the wine from the sediment of dropped yeast. A story needs to be revisited after it’s been setting for a month or so. New ideas will appear, errors will stand out. The story may seem like junk at this point. The wine doesn’t taste good either! Time to edit/revise!

Repeat….
Repeat…..
Repeat….

With each stage, the wine gets clearer, brighter, and smoother…as does the story.

6)    Aging
After numerous rackings, the wine is clear and smells great! A story has been honed and errors have been corrected. Now it’s time to reach out to agents or get ready to self-publish. This takes time. The longer wine sits in bulk, the better it gets. Did the story land a publisher or ready to self-publish? Time for step 7! If not, what’s wrong with waiting a little longer to make things even better?

7)    Bottling
This is the last step to the process in wine making. The wine is ready for bottling and is siphoned to smaller bottles. Labels are glued to the bottle and the wine is ready for drinking (or bottle aging). The story is with an agent or has been self-published. Now everyone can enjoy what has been created! (or hate it – we all have different tastes).

This post really is not about a whole lot today.  I’m not even sure what category to place it in.  I suppose it will go in my “pet peeves” category since it’s a bit of a rant.

The newest hobby of mine is to make wine.  I’ve been making wines from kits and have slowly been building up my equipment supply since some of it is quite costly.  With a few kits completed, I decided it was time to move on to using fresh fruit.

After checking local prices, I found pears to be the cheapest.  I called around and located the store with the cheapest rates on pears.  I ended up ordering 25 lbs of pears to make 6 gallons of wine.  Aside from a few crazy looks when picking up that volume of pears, everything was fine.  It was at the checkout that brings me to my rant though.

I purposely went to the customer service line because I knew I had a strange order and it may need someone who was a little more experienced.

After glancing at all the pears I had, the checkout lady, I’ll call her Mrs. Prim for this post, gave me yet another crazy look.  It’s just pears, I thought to myself, Only a lot of them.  What’s the problem?

Mrs. Prim began weighing them out in a few bunches at a time even though I told her the weight – but I don’t blame her for it as I know people probably try to sneak things by all the time.  She paused a moment and looked at me and said, “Whatchya got?  Some kinda pear fetish?”

I had to repeat it to myself for a moment to make sure I heard it right.  I remember thinking to myself, Did she just ask if I had a pear fetish?  A bit stunned, I replied that I was making wine and needed a lot of pears.  I almost felt like saying, “Right. I’m going to take each one of these pears and use them for my kinky desires.  All 25 lbs of them.”

I know, it’s an off topic post tonight, but it is Friday so I think I’m allowed a free pass, and this is the beauty of a blog – I can write stuff just for the heck of it.  🙂