squish the grapes slowly

keanu reeves i am not. and i hated "a walk in the clouds." but LOVED my adventure with friend jannine to beverly's wine- and beer-making store for a beginners' wine-making class!

picture a talkative william h. macy (not quite the minnesotan accent from fargo, but close) with one hand in a sling pouring glass after glass of homemade brew for 6 of us to sample as we learned about the different kinds of yeast that make different flavors, why you can't make a cabernet with 18% alcohol (apparently you have to start with twice the sugar as desired alcohol content, but if you have 36% sugar, the yeasties sometimes get tired of eating and conk out early like thanksgiving day in front of the big game, leaving you with syrup), that they bottle something called bourbon-honey mead (!!!) but can't sell it at the store because their half of western ave. is actually dry, so they have to sell actual alcohol at the store across the street. we started a batch of pinot grigio - i love red wine but we preferred the immediate drinkability of whites for a first attempt; wouldn't your heart break if you spent weeks waiting patiently to bottle your wine, then 3-6 months for it to age properly, and then it was yucky?

the process has been pretty easy so far. we mixed yeast with grape juice, bobbed a little sugar-and-alcohol-0-meter in the mixture to test the concentration, giggled a lot at the instructor telling us we had to be "sterile," but that our sterile working area was the top of the bucket that the grape juice gets put in (enter much jannine whispering "oops, i breathed into our sterile field. wait, was that your hair entering the air over our sterile field?" we medical types aren't funny, i realize, but there was a lot of wine and we found ourselves quite clever), and sealed up the bucket. next week we get to go back to see if our yeast are eating the sugar or not and switch buckets.

in 6-10 weeks we get to bottle, label and serve. suggestions for names? anyone lining up to be willing to taste? (if it helps, no, my hair did not end up in the wine.)