Mike Kelley now has goats and oh these kids are so cute! Husbandry over herbicide!
Clam digging
Last weekend me and Katie drove up to Olympia to visit Ben and Sonya. We visited the capitol and walked around town. When I was a kid on road trips with my dad he loved to walk around sleepy little towns, through the old neighborhoods, commenting on the houses and yards.
Before the super bowl started we took advantage of the low tide and dug for some clams and mussels in Eld Inlet. The clams live in the dirt and look like rocks. The mussels live in the water and wrap their beards around rocks, creating chains of mothers, grandmothers, rocks and children!
I need to admit that I am cat crazy. I am cat crazy. I have a problem. People who maintain sanity are not necessarily more clearheaded then those who have psychotic breaks. Sanity is a coralling, a blocking off, a partitioning of the mind into the acceptable and the unacceptable. Instead of posting further lol catz links, I will instead create a page at dovydenas.com/cats where I will maintain a list of the 20 best animal links.
Bottle Run
I'm collecting bottles to reuse for bottling my wine. I've been doing this for 8 years now, but not at any sort of scale. When I was making 10 or 20 gallons a year in my basement I could satisfy my needs by saving the empty bottles from my own consumption. But now that I'm producing commercially that's no longer possible. So I've started collecting bottles from the recycling bins of restaurants.
There was a profusion of good bottles this Sunday, a nice change from new years when people were drinking lots of Champagne. I'm looking for only the tapering Burgundy shaped bottles. And if anyone has molded their domaine or fancy title into the glass, such as the winemakers from Chateau Neuf de Pape, or Barberba de Alba, I can't use those either.
The six bottles on the right in this picture are of the type I can use. The two on the left, in the straight Bordeaux shaped bottles, I collected as keepsakes. It's facinating collecting all these bottles. Unlike the wine lists in a restaurant, these bottles show what people are actually drinking.
The magnum of Lynch-Bages was probably the most expensive I found this week. This particular bottle sells for around $350, so the restaurant perhaps charged $500. The winery was founded in 1749 and currently produces 25,000 cases a year. That makes for a pretty tidy haul! It appears to be the most widely drunk high end Bordeaux at the restaurants I collect from.
Cayuse is the superstar of Washington state. They pursue all the extreme things the Robert Parker school of wine advocates. They harvest as late as possible, resulting in high alchohol levels and a fruit leather flavor. In this case it clocks in at 15.3% alchohol! Also, very low yields, probably on the order of two or three pounds of friut per vine, increases the amount of dissolved solids and flavor. These low yields are one of the primary reasons good wine will always be more expensive. I should look into what their winery practices are. Of this bottle the Wine Advocate says
It displays a Cote-Rotie-like nose of smoked meat, game, and bacon with a dollop of burnt sugar and blueberry making an appearance.
Day, the wine with the pastel clouds, is a from a new winemaker, Brianne Day, who among other things has worked for John Grochau. Now if I can just find bottles of her wine not empty that would be tasty!
The Chardonnay from Kalin Cellars is interesting. This is a winemaker that intentionally witholds wine from sale, after being bottled. They cellar it for 15 years, slap on some fresh labels and sell it alongside their new releases. I've had one of these, although I forget the year. I remember it being a little limp and dusty.
Homemade heroin by Czechoslovakian street addicts. It's amazing how easy it is to make, but as the video shows, if it's not purified you tend to vomit a lot. From field to vein in just minutes though.