With 21 years under our belts, you can be certain that we’ve had a few goofs through all that time. It happens. Things don’t always go as planned, and working with fruit can sometimes be tricky. We just do what we can and go forward from there.
Several years back Steve called me up at my “real job” and told me he was having to dump a large tank of lemon wine. He didn’t know what happened, but it was congealed and nasty. That was a major loss for us, but what turned it into a great story was when I got home and he’s on the porch looking whooped. Turns out he’d forgotten the pectic enzyme and the entire huge tank had turned into lemon jelly on him. It could have been saved, but he didn’t think about that until he was finishing the cleanup. We still laugh about it and use it as a learning example.
Early in our existence, Hurricane Rita decided to visit East Texas. She knocked out the power at the winery for better than a week. We had to get wine moved quickly, and didn’t have enough tanks to put everything into secondary, so we called up Southwest Canners out of Nacogdoches and asked if they had any barrels we could get. Sure enough, they did. Cue the mad run music as we ran down to get them and then get back to move wine around. It worked and we were able to get things moved and kept cool. A few months later we start bottling and notice an interesting flavor in our peach wine. Not bad, just very, VERY interesting…and familiar. It was Dr Pepper. The barrels we had got had contained soda syrup, and the flavors had been absorbed into them. Well, we wound up with way too much Dr Pepper peach wine to say the least. We sold it at a highly discounted rate, and gave a lot away to anyone that wanted it. That one is also still talked about today.
This last month we introduced a short run wine called Schrodinger’s Elderberry. It’s a dry finish elderberry wine. We don’t normally do this, but we thought the flavor was perfect. The reason behind the name is another of the “interesting mistakes” made around here. The elderberry wine had sat in tank much longer than we would prefer. Elderberry is one of those creatures that has 3 stages: not ready, ready, gone, and it’s a narrow window between the last two. Usually. We had been referring to the 300 gallons of elderberry as Schrodinger’s because we knew it was either going to be good or not, but we didn’t want to touch it until we had the time to deal with all of it. When we opened the tank, we were shocked to find it was beyond good, it was perfect! We filtered and prepped it for bottling, but TJ decided to keep a tank just as it was. Will this be repeated? Hard to say. But we’ll see.
So just remember, many mistake can be a learning experience. It just depends on how you want to see it. Have a great day and may the summer be kind to all of us.