Primary Fermentation

I’m using the Lalvin EC-1118 yeast that came with the Sauv. Blanc kit. Primary Fermentation Mixed all ingredients according to recipe on Gooseberry can and let sit overnight. Rather than using a damp cloth I am just covering the bucket with the lid and airlock but not snapping it tight. (My concern is that my cats will jump on top of the bucket and ruin the whole thing!) Added yeast the next morning. Leaving the primary fermenter upstairs this time to meet the 70 – 80°F instructions. Also, every morning I am gently stirring the must. The recipe on the G-berry can says to be careful not to disturb the settlement at the bottom. Doesn’t make any sense, if you ask me.

Secondary Fermentation

Pulled the fruit out of the wine and racked the wine into a carboy for secondary fermentation. Ended up pulling over a little more of the lees than I wanted to, but not too concerned. There wasn’t as much lees as I normally see with the red wines anyway.

Primary Fermentation

Wine base + Yeast (Lalvin K1-V1116) + Sugar were $49.84. Primary Fermentation Mixed all ingredients according to recipe on Gooseberry can and let sit overnight. Added yeast the next morning. Leaving the primary fermenter upstairs this time to meet the 70 – 80°F instructions. Also, every morning I am gently stirring the top portion of the must. Note that I wasn’t informed about needing a straining sack for the fruit-stuff, so the fruit is freely distributed in the must. I don’t think this will affect the wine, but it will be a pain to remove the fruit-stuff when the time comes.

Secondary Fermentation

I was mostly successful at straining the fruit skins & stuff from the wine using my new straining bag and a slotted spoon. During racking I watched the siphon hose, and particles didn’t really start flowing through the hose until the last half gallon. The wine in the carboy doesn’t seem too messy. Might have to clear the remaining cruft from the top of the carboy slowly over the next few days.  Fermentation appears to have started back up and lees has already begun to form toward the bottom of the carboy. . . spoke with Juanita’s dad and he recommend I poor it back into the primary fermenter through the filter bag to get the wine clean sooner rather than later. I did this by way of a colander suspended at the brim of the bucket with the straining bag draped over it. This worked very well. Then racked the wine back into the clean carboy. Not seeing as much initial fermentation activity, but will check in a few hours. Hopefully the additional filtering didn’t disrupt the fermentation process completely… Nope. Within a few hours fermentation was bubbling away. 2010-01-30: Still bubbling away, occasionally building up a half-inch of bubbles on the surface. 2010-02-06: Still bubbling away, though with a little less aggression. 2010-02-06: Still bubbling away, though with a little less aggression. 2010-02-13: There is STILL a very light bit of fermentation going on. Something unexpected happened yesterday: the wine, though still fermenting, has started to clear! Throughout the process the wine/must has been a cloudy, faint yellow. Now the cloudiness is diminishing throughout and even more so toward the bottom. 2010-02-25: STILL fermenting, though it continues to be of a lower and lower amount. Seems like wine continues to be clearing a little more. This weekend it will have been 5 weeks of secondary fermentation! 2010-03-06: Still a light bit of fermentation going on. I added some potassium sorbate in attempt to stop the fermentation and hopefully begin some serious clearing.

Clearing

Primary Fermentation

Not much to report.

Secondary Fermentation

Not much to report. Smells great so far.

Clearing

The wine, while stirring, produced a lot of foam. Very foamy. Topped-up with Leese Fitch Cabernet Sauvignon.

Secondary Clearing

Added some Campden tablets after racking into a clean carboy. Lots of foam was produced after the tablet powder was poured into the wine. Topped up with my own Shiraz from 2009.

Tertiary Clearing

Ryan’s not quite done with the label (some final tweaks) and I figured an extra week or two of clearing could only do it some good. I racked the wine again. It will probably make the bottling experience a bit more simple with very little or no lees on the bottom of the carboy. I guess that same characteristic might also mean that it will yield an additional bottle due to topping it up (with other wines) each time I pull it off of the lees.

Needless to say, my character chart now includes decimal and hexadecimal/Unicode references for the characters in the Polish alphabet.

HTML CHARACTER CODES

INGREDIENTS

• 96 oz     Gooseberry fruit wine base product (1 can)
• 2.6 gal   Warm Water (3.5 cans)
• 7 lbs     White Table Sugar
• 1 tsp     Acid Blend
• 1 tsp     Yeast Nutrient
• 1 tsp     Pectic Enzyme
• 3         Campden Tablets (crushed) [Sodium Bisulfite]

• 1 pkg     Wine Yeast (Lalvin K1-V1116)

• 6 tsp     Bisulfite Solution
• 1.5 tsp   Potassium Sorbate
• 5 lbs     White Table Sugar
• 1.75L     Brandy 40% ABV/80 proof (e.g. Paul Masson V.S.O.P. Brandy)

NOTES:

BISULFITE SOLUTION: Dissolve 5 teaspoons of sodium bisulphite in 1 cup (8 ounces) of water to make bisulphite solution. For Campden Tablets see label for instructions.

BRANDY: Any kind of brandy can be used according to your preference. If you use a brandy of a different ABV than above the final percentage of alcohol will need to be recalculated.

INSTRUCTIONS

Preparation

1. Sanitize all equipment and utensils with bisulphite solution (rinse-less sanitizer/bisulfite solution).
2. Put straining bag in primary fermenter, add fruit and tie off bag.
3. Add first set of ingredients (those preceding Wine Yeast) into the primary fermenter. Stir solution well to make sure sugar is dissolved. Specific Gravity of this solution should be between 1.085 and 1.095 at 65 – 70°F, which will yield 12% alcohol.
4. Cover with a damp cloth or fine mesh fabric and let sit over night to allow Sodium Bisulfite (SO2) to be released.

Fermentation and Clearing

1. In the morning sprinkle yeast on top of must. Air temperature should be between 70-80°F. Cover with primary fermenter lid and airlock.
2. Next day, gently stir must. Repeat daily until specific gravity lowers to 1.040 (4 or 5 days).
3. When gravity reads 1.040, remove bag of fruit. Press and strain juice from pulp and discard pulp. Rack must into secondary vessel, top up with water to minimize air space. Attach airlock.
4. Rack wine again (3 to 4 weeks) when gravity reads 1.010 to 1.000. Add 1 tsp. bisulphite solution per gallon of must to preserve wine for extended storage.

Finish and Bottling

1. After wine is clear (1 to 3 months) rack wine back into sanitized primary fermenter.
2. Add Potassium Sorbate to stabilize (prevent renewed fermentation) and stir well.
3. Add Brandy and stir well.
4. Sweeten to taste with additional Sugar.
5. Bottle. Age at least 6 months to one year before drinking.

Actually Using This Recipe

1. Gooseberry Port 2010- –

Primary Fermentation

Primary Fermentation setup was the usual. Fermentation took a full two days to really get started. I’m sure this is due to the low temperatures currently present in the basement. At 52°F the fluid was much colder than I had realized, but fermentation seems to be happening so I’m curious how this will affect the resulting wine.

Secondary Fermentation

There were a lot of bubbles arriving at the surface throughout the secondary fermentation. A solid ring of bubbles along the glass and toward the end bubble clusters appeared in the center of the must as well.

Clearing

Nothing too unusual. I topped-up with Mirrasou Cabernet Sauvignon and added some crushed Campden tablets for preservation. Plan to store this one for at least 6 months, maybe longer.

Secondary Clearing

Wine looks quite clear, but much more dense than the two cheaper kits. Taste is also more complex even now. Transferred to new carboy successfully, topped up with my 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon.

Bottling

Wine is very clear but very dense and dark in color. Much darker than the previous two red wine kits. The taste had the usual ‘yeasty’ flavor of what I know to be young wines, but there seems to be more depth or structure present. I’m hoping to find that aging will produce a wine much more similar to a commercial dry red. The cheaper kits certainly didn’t accomplish that, though they were still drinkable. Produced 32 bottles.

Primary Fermentation

Primary fermentation was executed with bucket lid and air lock this time. 2009-11-04: Check SG, It has been cool weather with chilly nights since beginning the fermentation.

Secondary Fermentation

Not much to report.

Clearing

SG was two points higher than the instructions, but it hadn’t changed in three days. I think some plastic shavings came off of the handle and into the wine during the stirring process. Not concerned that it will affect taste, but hope the shavings will float to the top and be easy to skim out of the wine before bottling.

Secondary Clearing

A little bit early, but with the very cool basement and a firm quantity of lees at the bottom (again, about 1.25”) I went ahead and racked for the second clearing/bulk aging. Collected some of the near-lees wine into a pitcher to clear off most of lees by chilling. Will add cleared wine back to carboy and top-up carboy with filtered water later today. Wine seems to have a lot of character with a heavy fruit smell.

Bottling

.25” of lees on the bottom of the carboy. Followed same procedure as last time. Didn’t text specific gravity. Wine appeared to be very clear.

Primary Fermentation

Primary fermentation was executed with bucket only covered loosely by the lid and thin cloth. This may prove to be problematic for the end product. The specific gravity measurements show that within eight days all of the sugar had been converted to alcohol. According to the instructions the SG should have been just above 1.0 at the start of secondary fermentation. They also suggest that the clearing should happen with SG at 0.0995. So after the first seven days this batch is 10 days ahead of schedule. After speaking with Juanita’s dad about it there is some concern about the wine being over-oxidized.

Clearing

Didn’t check the SG, but simple instructions of aggressive stirring appeared to work fine. Shortly after the stirring and the addition of Potassium Sorbate, Potassium Metabisulfate and Chitosan the solids were certainly on their way to settling out.

Secondary Clearing

After 14 days of clearing per the instructions the carboy had about 1.25” of lees on the bottom. I was prepared for bottling, but the taste test had a ‘yeasty’ flavor. After some discussion with Tim I purchased a second carboy and racked the wine into it, leaving off all of the lees that I could see. Wine now appears to be very near completely clear. I plan on leaving it to clear another 14 days.

3 days after racking into second carboy there is more settled lees visible (.25” at least). I am optimistic that this additional lees settling is a sign that the taste of the wine is still improving.

Bottling

14 days after racking into second carboy. No tests. Tastes fine. Technically it’s been bulk aged for 2 weeks at this point. 6 gallon carboy yields 30 + 1.5 bottles. Placed plastic wrap over bottle tops after they were cleaned. This plastic also worked well to cover the wine-filled bottles, allowing for corking all bottles after filling was done.

Tasting 2009-11-27

The wine is very clear with a nice dark red color and no sediment. I’m quite happy with those attributes because I think they suggest that my methods are good. The wine seems to have quite a high amount of alcohol which can probably be attributed to the additional sugar Tim and I added at primary fermentation. Seems a bit strong. Probably won’t add sugar to future kits. The bouquet seems to still have a bit of the ‘yeasty’ smell, but it’s very faint. The flavor so far is light (thin) but pleasant and does not include the ‘yeasty’ characteristic. The flavor is so light that I can’t say it is distinctly Cabernet Sauvignon. Juanita found the wine pleasant enough to drink but not particularly memorable.

Tasting 2009-12-14

Flavor seems to be more pronounced. With a bit of decanting it tastes pretty good. I’m thinking spending a bit more on the juice kit would yield better flavor.

Tasting 2010-02-05

It’s actually tasting quite good at this point, but it’s still too thin and lacking in after taste to truly resemble a commercial cabernet. Still a bit of the ‘yeasty’ smell, though it’s quite faint. Some friends remarked a few weeks ago of it tasting ‘acid’. Not too familiar with that description, but am curious if bottle was stored properly on its side. Perhaps the wine had become ‘corked’? Or my wine tasting skills are just not that sophisticated.

Not sure when this feature was added, but I’m running the Inkscape 0.47 preview and discovered that the default install now includes a “Printing Marks” feature. You can access it from the main menu:

Extensions > Render > Printing Marks

The small options window that pops up allows you to adjust a variety of settings for the position of the marks as well as the type of marks to be displayed, seeming to cover all of the needs of a typical commercial printing process.

The “Live Preview” option makes it easy and efficient to adjust the settings to match your desired output. Once you hit Apply the specified marks are added to your document as vector art in a new, locked layer titled “Printing Marks”.

In the past I’ve manually created crop marks when needed, but this is a major step on the road to serious recognition and use by graphic design professionals. Eventually it would be great to see these options removed to a print and/or export dialog interface, but this is an excellent option to have as well.

Inkscape is an open source and free application built around the SVG recommendation that makes it easy to create vector images. I use it to create illustrations as well as single-page layouts of all sizes. In fact, I recently created a business card layout with Inkscape, exported as PDF and sent to a printer to create offset business cards. The cards turned out great without any problems. A serious vector art tool.

Earlier this week I was at Best Buy for an unrelated computer project and, on my way out, I swung through the laptop section. After looking everything over it was apparent that anything that was under $500 was crap. However, NONE of the machines were very appealing to me. I know that for a computer I should just be concerned with the performance aspects, but I can’t help but be extremely interested in the overall design of the hardware.

Looking at all of those laptops was disappointing in that aspect. But for Apple and Lenovo, all of the computer manufacturers have apparently decided that all computers must look like some kind of pimped-out Honda Accord. All of them are very glossy plastic and generally covered in distracting ‘designer’ details. The new Dell Studio line is an improvement, but I was underwhelmed by the ‘feel’ of those devices. They felt cheap and bulky and were all priced at the high end. The Sonys look a little better, but not much and they are WAY over priced.

None of these machines resembled the regal designs of Apple or Thinkpad laptops. I know Thinkpads are often considered ugly and bland, but I don’t agree with that. The T-series especially are always very thin with hinges, buttons and levers that intuitively make sense. And the cases always feel very serious and rugged. The Thinkpad is actually better than any Apple laptop in my opinion since it doesn’t allow aesthetics to override functionality. There are plenty of buttons next to the trackpads. The display-latch is not some thin little button that you have to push with your fingernail (Titanium Powerbook).The arrow keys are not scaled down to fit into the overall rectangle of the keyboard.

Speaking of screwed up keyboards, just used a friend’s Dell-AlienWare laptop last night… why would a gamer or anyone that would spend that much money on a laptop want a keyboard that is compromised in any way? For example, the laptop was a 17″ display version with a full number pad but for some reason important keys like the arrow keys, the right-shift key and the question mark/slash key were all micro-sized to fit into a rectangular keyboard outline. It made the keyboard almost unusable. I kept hitting the Shift key instead of the slash-key while typing in URLs. Why would you do that to a premium laptop keyboard? These hardware designers have obviously lost touch with reality. Or maybe gamers really don’t use their computers for anything other than gaming.

After all of this frustration I ended up finding a good laptop at the unbelievable price of $378 on NewEgg.com’s daily specials. I did some quick research and decided to go with it as a compromise to save some money. When the machine arrived two days later I was mostly delighted. What’s the machine? A Lenovo G530. Never heard of it? Neither had I.

Apparently Lenovo’s Value Line isn’t very heavily promoted. Also, if you go to their site, the price isn’t much different from their IdeaPad line. The price on NewEgg was pretty spectacular. I knowingly made some compromises, but overall I’m very happy with this new laptop, how it runs and how it looks.

Once you carefully peal off the ‘Intel Dual Pentium Inside’ and ‘Built for Windows Vista’ decals the machine is all black with some subtle gray print and a few blue lights. The only real design misstep is the oversized Lenovo logo on the outside cover. It could have been half the size or maybe even a third. And it’s some kind of metal decal that’s inset into the cover, so you would probably do more  damage than good trying to remove it. Here’s a short list of gripes:

• The display would be better if it had a latch that held it closed.
• The oversized exterior Lenovo logo
• It’s thicker than my Thinkpad T42
• The exterior cover is a smooth black that shows finger smudges.
• They could have saved time and forgotten about the touch-sensitive buttons.
• A middle-button with the trackpad would have been nice.
• Display is glossy

Here’s a list of nice features:

• Very quiet
• Very cool to touch even after long hours of use
• Touchpad is as good and sensitive as a Thinkpad’s
• Display is big, sharp and bright
• Keyboard is great
• Runs Ubuntu Linux as though it were its intended OS
• Wireless turn-off switch is handy
• Exterior looks great
• Handling/moving laptop build feels strong and well-built
• Video playback is excellent

And here are the specs:

• Pentium Dual-Core T4200 — 2 GHz
• 2 GB of RAM
• 15″ display — 1280 x 800
• 150 GB Hard Drive
• DVD-RW Optical Drive
• Built-in Webcam
• Built-in a/b/g Wireless
• 4 USB ports
• VGA-out port
• Ethernet port
• Modem port
• Multi-Card Reader
• Line In jack
• Headphone jack

This is a good system and great for running Linux. Some of the hardware needs proprietary drivers (wireless) but with Ubuntu getting drivers like that is fairly simple. A great budget machine that, in my opinion, is much better looking and less bulky than most of the ]more expensive models that are on the market currently. If you can find it at the price I got, this is an amazing machine compared to the much smaller and less powerful netbooks that are similarly priced.