Wine. With actual grapes.

Steve the automechanic has a very dim opinion of my car husbandry. Our poor old Holden went flat about six weeks ago. The RACV fella came and said the battery was some vestige from the Keating era. He sold us a new one. Three days later, the new one was flat too. I saw this as an opportunity not to drive anywhere for a month. Which was perfectly lovely, with the exception of the morning I signed up to be on the La Trot picket line from 7am. After a month of being carless and fancy-free, finally, on Friday morning, with visiting parents-in-law about to descend from the north, I called the RACV again. A new fella came. I shouldn't have left the battery empty for so long. He recharged it. I lugged the car two kilometres up the road to Steve, who did some expensive things to the alternator, revived the battery a bit more, and then advised me, in terms not so much insistent as pleading, to drive it every day for a week until the battery is back in business. I think he's hoping I'll form sensible new motoring habits. And indeed I would, were driving not (a) expensive, (b) polluting, (c) unconducive to the little bit of exercise I could otherwise get between stints of sedentary work, (d) potentially lethal, (e) incompatible with the reading I do on public transport, and (f) detrimental to the rambling-down-alleys-sampling-stray-bits-of-edible-botany lifestyle.

The fact is, I shouldn't own a car. I should be sharing one with a dozen other drivers: once a fortnight I should have it to buy sacks of chookfood or take Harriet and Bea Cat to the vet or ferry the menagerie to Mum's place for the weekend. Organising a communal automobile arrangement (one where noone minds that I leave the boot festooned with bits of stray lucerne hay and mushroom compost) is one of my long term ambitions. In the meantime, I am driving the car every day for a week. Blah.

The one thing that makes me feel better about driving is acquiring some ridiculously large quantity of biomass while I have the wheels to carry it with: 17 sacks of horse poo, a couple of bales of straw, 50kg of exotic barley for the brewmeister. So as I was taking the car for its constitutional pootle yesterday, I was relieved to spy a man standing on St Georges Road just south of Bell St, surrounded by towering boxes of grapes.

We came home with a massive carton of these lovelies:

Grenache grapes, from Wildwood vineyard in Bulla. 

One of my longterm career ambitions has been grape-treading. Tragically, I couldn't be bothered sterilising the bathtub, so we resorted to our trusty fruit press (an absurdly spendy bit of equipment that we mostly use to crush the honey out of honeycomb, but which was also integral to Operation Cider Y2K13, Operation Feijoa Wine Y2K13, and Operation Pear Juice, and which I am pleased to use as often as possible so as to reduce the cost per use ratio from heinous to ... less heinous).

The result was many, many litres of grenache juice, which is currently sitting in a carboy with a dash of sodium metabisulphite to kill any rogue bacteria. The hydrometer reading (a measurement of sugar content) tells us that we're heading dangerously into dessert wine territory with this stuff. I'll let you know in a year.

Meanwhile, it turns out that pressing grapes results not only in grape juice, but pressed grapes. The chooks were rapturous for about five minutes and now never want to see a grape again.

Here's hoping the citizens of the compost bin have a longer grape tolerance.

Earth Garden

A few years ago I stole borrowed my ma's and pa's Earth Garden books. The First Earth Garden Book (1975) is full of right-on peops with back-to-the-land hair, relaying how to knit houses out of cucurbit tendrils and make sourdough out of potatoes and sip elderflower bubbly while half-naked in the moonlight. It's totally up my alley. Yes, I can leach the tannins from acorns and grind them into a serviceable ... erm ... "flour" and mold them into a sorta biscuit shape and eat them with very few clothes on!* Yes, I can clabber my own raw, unhomogenised breastmilk and go totally DIY camembert!** And oh yes, stinging nettle gnocci, you're the lunch for me.***

It wasn't long after I devoured the parental Earth Garden books, that I discovered a very much up-to-date Earth Garden magazine in my local newsagenterie and an Earth Garden presence on ye olde Pfaczbuch. As an enthusiast for all things trellised, foraged, grown, tended, transformed from SPC fruit tins, and wombat-themed, I was hooked.

So you can just possibly imagine my joy when the latest Earth Garden No. 167 arrived in the post today ...

... and among the fantabulous articles on foraging for chickweed and making rocket stoves out of junk and eating gingko leaves and the surprisingly complex business of harvesting autumn veg, and brewing your own perfume, and chocolate beetroot cake recipes, and tiny houses, and fowl-wrangling, was Tim's and my disquisition on vintnering feijoas.

Feijoas, although green, torpedoid and delicious, have a habit of rotting all too soon after falling from the tree. Last year, with several kilos to despatch before they self-composted, we made 10 litres of feijoa wine, which turned out, in my opinion (but not in the opinion of my mother, my friend Eleanor, my mother-out-law, or my friend Lucy), quite delicious. At any rate, it hits you with that fruity feijoa-y fragrance, and then, when you drink it, turns out to be kind of dry and (this is the bit that amazed me, because who would have thought you could just chuck fruit juice and tea leaves and yeast in a tub and leave it to transmogrify) it tastes genuinely winey.

So we wrote about it. The science of feijoa fermentation must be shared, dagnabbit. And our account was published, just in time for feijoa season, if this little guy in the front garden is any guide ...

* an actual 1970s Earth Garden recommendation, which I actually tried. Disappointing. But good to know that, with enough oak trees, I wouldn't lack for calories after an apocalypse.
** not an actual 1970s Earth Garden recommendation
*** this wasn't recommended in a 1970s Earth Garden publication either, but I read about it somewhere, and I would totally do this. Nettles are the schizzle.