In vino familia (or something like that)
A few years ago, my Uncle Rob and his friend Jim decided they were going to learn how to make wine. Their first year didn't turn out so good, so they decided to ignore it and make wine for the first time again the next year. I had the rare honor of trying some of the wine from their first first year--it was labeled, variously, "good", "bad", and "ugly"--and I support their decision.
They found their wine legs quickly, though, and by their third year, they entered nine of their wines into an annual contest by the Vintners of Northeast Ohio (VINO, of course). The contest confers eighteen awards each year, and my uncle and his friend took home six of them.
Needless to say, the time was ripe for further expansion. They sucked my father into their production this year, and shortly after Christmas my cousin Mike and I were roped in to help with the wine racking process.
Wine racking involves transferring wines from one container to another during the fermentation process, filtering out any sediment that might have precipitated out, and performing various voodoo wining rituals to adjust the hue and flavor of the varieties. I managed to snap a few pictures during the process, before I was overcome from all of the vitally important wine tasting, and had to go lie down.
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