JINKSTO

A friend and coworker (he was just a coworker until he sent me free stuff!) recently sent me a book in the mail.  Having read my Redneck Wine Makin’ Guide he thought that I might appreciate a copy of The Alaskan Bootleggers Bible and was, in fact, very much correct.  If you’ve read my post and liked it then you’ll love this book.  The author,  Leon W Kania, claims to feel the same way that I do about high end vintners but has a lot more experience on which to base his claims.  The book covers a very basic recipe for making wine and then goes on to provide a stack of additions to that for every kind of wine that you can imagine.  It’s nice because this approach let’s you start to understand what’s really required in your winemaking efforts and then shows you how to modify that base with your own creations.  The recipes themselves and the dialog discussing the making of wine are full of witty (and often very funny) stories.  The book goes on to discuss both distillation and beer making.  The former is something that I’m very much looking forward to and the latter  I’ll probably read just for the anecdotes although I have no intention of making beer. Mr. Kania  writes in a style similar to the one I used in my post but does a MUCH better job of it.  He does offer the use of a hydrometer in a few places in the book but notes that this is not required.   The book sells for $21.95 USD (plus $5 for shipping) direct from the publisher and is absolutely worth the money.  The only downside is that I’m now very much indebted to a coworker.   If you’re going to make wine whether using my way or the “scientific” way I recommend reading this book.  Even if you opt for the more detailed approach you’ll appreciate the recipes and humor that he provides.

Having nothing to handy to ferment and looking for something cheap and easy I’ve been reading his book in the hopes that it would provide inspiration.  I wasn’t disappointed.  The book provides a recipe for Mead or Honey Wine that’s very simple.   The recipe is looked great but due to issues with resource acquisition I modified it a bit.  Here’s the recipe for the batch that I made:

6lbs honey (discount, cheapo walmart brand)
15 oz Chopped raisins ( Sunmaid… is there any other kind?)
1 Gallon of water
1/2 Gallon of fruit Juice (V8 Splash, Tropical Blend)

Mr Kania’s recipe called for 1lb of raisins but for some insane reason you can only get them in boxes of 15 oz… I don’t know why… I’m sure there’s some silly reason for it but rather than by a 15 oz box and a 1.5oz (yeah… not 1 oz.) and count raisins to get a pound I just used 15 oz.  The same thing happened with the Honey.  He called for 4.5 lbs but the largest I could find were 3 lb bottles.  The 1 lb bottles were nearly twice as much (per oz) as the 3 lb bottles so I just bought two and added extra honey.  To offset that I increased the recommended 1/2 gallon of water to 1 gallon.   (note that there wasn’t a great deal of math involved here.  It was much more, “hmm more honey, more water..”.  It’ll work out…  I hope.  If you want the original recipe, buy his book.

Mrs. Jinksto and I went off to Walmart this morning and were back shortly with raisins and honey.  I set the gallon of water to boiling and set the jars of honey up to their necks in hot water in the sink to thin them a bit and make for easier pouring.  While the water was getting hot I dumped the raisins in the food processor and started chopping them.  Now, I don’t know how the hell you’re supposed to make chopped raisins but I can confirm for you that putting nearly a pound of them in the food processor and setting it to “chop” on “high” will create a very thick raisin paste.  um… yum…  The paste was too thick to get into the top of my 3 gallon carboy (that’s a fancy name for a water bottle remember?) easily and I was at a loss for how to do it without making a HUGE mess.  I thought about just dumping them into the gallon of boiling water and letting everything sort of dissolve but there were whole raisins still in that thick gooey mass which would have stopped up my funnel and the last thing you need when pouring boiling water with 5lbs of honey dissolved in it is a stopped up funnel.  So while the water boiled, the honey melted and the yeast was starting in a nearby jar of warm water I worked on getting raisin goo into the carboy.

The raisin goo was thick (very) and sticky (extremely).  As I’ve noted, I didn’t want to get the top of the jug all messy because there’s no way to easily clean it up when you’ve got a batch of must cooking in it.  I finally hit on the idea of rolling the raisin goo into a series of thin logs and then carefully feeding them through the top of the bottle trying to avoid touching the top.  This actually worked WAY better than I thought it would.  After 10 minutes of rolling and then carefully dropping the raisin goo logs into my carboy I was impressed.  I was excited that I had figured this out and avoided a bad mess.  I stood back, looked upon my work with a huge amount of pride and was immediately (and completely) horrified.    Laying in there in the bottom of my carboy was a large pile of sticky, gooey raisin logs that looked for all the world like… well… if you haven’t figured it out by now let’s just go with the fact that I was horrified by my creation.  So horrified in fact that I went and woke Mrs Jinksto up form her nap just so that I could show her what I had wrought.  She too was horrified which justified my position but, apparently, not my disturbing her nap.  I think her exact words were something like, “Oh God!  You woke me up to show me THAT!” 

I really don’t want to go on about this but, wow… if you’re in theater or the movie business and need a pile of fake fecal matter made up, give ole Jinksto a call… I can help you out.

After the lady had stormed out of the room I quickly poured the half gallon of V8 fruit juice over things to cover what I”d done.  I added the melted honey to my now boiling pot of water and used the boiling water to rinse out the rasinated food processor.   I let all of this cool for a bit and then poured the still very hot water into my carboy.  I was worried that the water would break the glass of the jug so went very slow.  Either I went slowly enough or the honey-water had cooled enough that it was an issue.  I survived, the jug survived, we’re in business!

I let things cool just a bit more and then shook the three gallon carboy enough to generally break things up inside, get the raisins mixed with the rest of the concoction and generally cover up my foray into theater…

In a second, I’ll go back in there and pour the started yeast into the carboy and we’ll be well on our way to making a batch of Mead!

I think I’ll call it turd wine for a few more days just to annoy Mrs. Jinksto but will then try very hard to forget what I did.  I’m serious about that movie gig though… if you need help, let me know.

I’ve struggled with this post a bit.  Not because it’s difficult to write but because there’s an edge to it that I don’t like… a part that can easily be misinterpreted.  Still, it’s important to me to get these things down… on “paper”, as it were but it’s taken me nearly two weeks to do it. 

There are so many things that I want to write about this trip that it’s tough to focus.   There are the people that I saw, the places that I saw, the weather that I experienced, my new niece and, the funeral that I participated in and, of course, my grandmother.  I don’t see  a way to pull them all into a single post but neither do I want to write a series about this… It still doesn’t say the things that I want but I’m stuck on it and I have other things that I want to write about so this is the best you get.

My Grandmother died two weeks ago. She was nearly 91. I got the call late on Friday night and at 4:00AM the next morning I was already up, in the car and 45 miles from home.  937 miles and 16 hours later I arrived at my brothers house in Louisiana.  Sixteen hours is a long time to spend in a car… especially one that gets nearly 400 miles on a tank of gas (fewer stops for essentials).   As I drove I listened to music and wrote blog posts in my head.  The posts got better as I added bits to the story, rewrote and edited them.  Then, as I grew tired they faded away.  Later, I’ll try to recreate them and will mostly fail.  Too bad for you… they were pretty good.

Sunday we were up early to visit the funeral home for what we call visitation or viewing or a wake.  I’d never heard of a “wake” before leaving Louisiana but apparently it’s becoming more the “in” thing to do, or at least, to call the same old thing.  Regardless of what you call it the process is the same.  You show up at the funeral home with food and visit with family and friends to show your support for them.  You might or might not pay your respects to the dead by walking quietly to the front of the chapel where she lays in a casket surrounded by flowers.  In cases where it’s needed you make sure that the family has everything they need.   It’s not a party but it’s not horribly depressing either.  One of my cousins used the time to up update the family tree.   The rest of us milled around and greeted one another talking quietly.

We were there most of the day Sunday but left early.  I don’t get home often enough and I wanted to spend some time with my brothers kids so we stopped at my dad’s house to ride four wheelers for a bit.  Only one of the two bikes would start so it was Uncle Jinksto with a 5 and 7 year old on one Honda Rancher.  We spent about 30 minutes riding around the old home place.  My grandparents house is near the front of the property about 300 yards down a gravel drive.   My Uncles house is a hundred yards from their house and my dads house is near the front of the property under a small hill.  Behind my grandparents house is about 11 acres of farmland that was used to feed six or eight families while I was growing up.  Behind that are the ponds that were stocked with catfish and where we spent untold hours fishing as kids.

Monday we were up and off to the funeral.  This was more of the same.  More visiting, more “it’s good to see you after all of these years, I wish it was under better circumstances” and more “you don’t know who I am, do you?”  At 10, everyone filed in and a short sermon by a Baptist preacher followed.  He shared hard words in a perfect and solid way.  Baptist preachers tend to be able to do that…. the good ones anyway.  They can say the things that you or I would never be able to and then soften the message, wrap it in glory and feed it to grieving families on a teaspoon.  This one was good.

Once the sermon was finished the back doors were opened and guests were allowed to pass by the casket on their way out to pay final respects.  As a pal bearer I was seated next to my brothers and cousins on the front row.  As I sat there I watched each person pass the casket.  Most would pause briefly for a last look.  Later, they’ll talk about how natural my Grandmother looked or how she’d have been shocked to have had her here done that way.  They’ll talk about how many flowers there were or how good the preacher was.  It’s all part of it, I guess… at least, it always has been in my experience.

The dress would have shocked people in many places.  These are poor people, or people who work for a living.  They came with no disrespect and grieved with us.  They wore they best they had whether suit or blue jeans and it was clean and without holes.  One of my cousins wore his EMT shirt, it’s a uniform for him.  The girl from the diner had on a uniform as well.  A farmer friend wore his best pair of coveralls and a clean shirt and returned to the fields as soon as he could.  They took time off from work to be there.  It was just country folk doing the best they could with what they had.  The family was honored to have them.

The people of my youth were there… old now.  People that I’ve known my whole life.  I can tell you stories about who started which business.  Who managed to get a volunteer fire department started.  Which house they lived in 40 years ago and who has slept with whom.  I can even name most ex-wives and almost all of the children.  Most of them were in their late 30’s or early 40’s when I knew them.  Still young and strong and working every day.  30 years has been kind to some, not so much to others.  It’s a reminder to enjoy what I have while I can.

After the last mourner had passed we were instructed in how to lift the casket to carry it to the car, which we did.  A long ride down back roads brought us to the cemetery and the conclusion of a life.

I stayed an extra day to spend time with the family.  On Tuesday morning my brother and I drove out to dad’s camp on the river.  It was nice to be there as well… another place that I spent a lot of time at as a kid.  When I was young there was an old tiny cabin on the place.  Over the years Dad and Friends have built a really nice camp house on the river.   The “river” is really more of a swamp… it’s a part of the river that even the river has abandoned.  It’s not truly a swamp because water still flows here from creeks and other minor waterways but not much… 

As soon as we got back I left for home.  On the way out I stopped and had a glass of sweet tea with one of my first cousins.  It’s been too many years since we had a chance to sit and chat and it was good to catch up with her.  I managed to get on the road at about 4:00 PM and drove all night… another 16 hours to get home.  As I left Louisiana The sun was going down and the night had cooled off enough to roll the windows down.  I blew through the back roads of Louisiana and Mississippi with all four windows down, the sunroof open and music blasting as loud as it would go.  Good, solid country rock to make the hours pass.   They are wide straight roads with no traffic… here’s a picture of the only cars I saw in over an hour. :)  As I drove through the night the 93% humidity of the deep south soaked my clothes with cooling dampness.  As passed over the Mississippi river I reveled in the stench of the thing.  The smell of rotting leaves and of America…  It’s a warm, rich smell… It smells like Home.

Thankfully, these speak for themselves:

…

Since last Friday I’ve driven about 2000 miles, attended a funeral, acted as a pallbearer, held a newborn, stayed awake for 37 hours straight, worked on a lawnmower and worked in a swamp.  There’s a lot that I want to share but it’s all still a bit jumbled up in my head.

I’ve seen the Mac vs PC commercials lately and I think they’re missing something. They need to include the line, “Hi I’m a Mac and you’re probably too stupid to buy me”.

Jinksto’s anniversary is coming up at the end of the month and Mrs Jinksto really wanted an iPhone. The newest and coolest iPhone is the “3GS” which can pretty much only be found at the Mac Store so Friday I looked up the location of the one here in Charlotte and Rob and I took lunch on the expensive side of town. After lunch we wandered through the mall to the Mac Store.

When we arrived there was a line of about 8 people standing outside the store so we blindly and dutifully stood in it. There’s probably a social lesson to be learned about the fact that we unquestioningly stood in a line outside of a store that I should write a post about but it would be a rather short post because we were only in line for about 30 seconds before the “What The Fuck?” side of our Redneck upbringing slapped us back into reality. I agreed “hold” our place in line while Rob wandered over to talk to the “teenage snob with a clipboard” door guard. There he was informed that if he wanted an iPhone he’d have to stand in line but if he wanted to browse the store he should feel free. If, while browsing, he discovered something that he wanted to buy he’d need to come back to the front of the store, get his name on a list and wait for an associate to help him. Rob relayed this information back to me and I quickly ditched my spot in line to “browse”.

As we walked in we promised door guard girl that we had no intention of attempting to buy anything in the store without first gaining proper approval. She didn’t seem worried and we shortly found out why. You see, in the “Mac Store” only major items… items that you MUST have an associate help you with… have price tags on them. Everything else is hung on the wall with care and without pricing. If you want to know how much that faux leather iphone cover costs you’ll need to ask an associate… and probably stand in line to ask them. If, on the other hand, you just HAD to have that faux leather iphone cover you could, I suppose, take it to the register and pay for it without asking for the price. I assume that at some point they would have to tell you how much you were being charged and at that point you could decline the payment, return the item to the rack and shop for something else. Rinse, repeat. I say “I assume” that you could do that because there was also a line for giving them your money which I didn’t want to deal with.

The place looks like a high end Radio Shack without the cool toys and rack of electronic components in the back. Since we didn’t have an associate locked to us we were promptly ignored by everyone in the store. The staff are either genuinely rude or just a bit snobbish in all regards. People, a lot of people, stand in line to be treated like this because it’s the “HIGH end computer store”. I think it’s garbage.

Now, admittedly, we weren’t dressed quite as well as the rest of the patrons. In fact we probably weren’t dressed as well as the construction workers across the street. I had on dirty blue jeans (hey, it was the middle of the day, they were mostly clean when I put them on) which were tucked into the tops of my wolverine work boots and was wearing a shabby shirt. Rob had on his coveralls and a T-Shirt. In their defense, they didn’t treat us any worse than any other customer. I was amused by the whole process and never once thought to scream at the snob at the front door, “You know missy, you work at the MALL!” Rob and I combined make about 4 times the salary of everyone working in that store. Either of us could have bought any two items in the place without blinking at the price tag… neither of us felt the need to point that out. As we left, Rob did make it a point to remind the door guard girl that the same products can be bought with less hassle at the local Best Buy and I managed to sneak in the fact that if you were going to go the trouble you could also get a PC at Best Buy. It was a snide thing to do but it offended the Mac Snob and made me grin.

Leaving there, we went to the local AT&T store and bought Mrs Jinksto an iPhone. They have the same broken business model at the AT&T store but there were no lines and the folks working there weren’t snobbish about the products that they sell. The AT&T store didn’t have the latest “3GS” model of the phone so I settled for the “3G” model which came in at half of the price. So, due to the painful mistreatment of customers, Apple lost out on the sale at their premium store and made about $150 less on the final sale… not counting whatever cut AT&T gets out of that. They can stand to lose a little more money. I wouldn’t have bought an iPhone at all but it was being purchased for my love and I can afford to swallow at least a tiny bit of pride to make her happy, which I did.

She loves the phone and I have to admit that they iPhone IS a cool bit technology and worth the price that they charge. It IS NOT worth the debasement that one must suffer to buy it at the Mac Store though… nothing is worth that.

Oh, and if you’re reading this and you take names at the front door of the SouthBrook Mac Store in Charlotte please realize the following: “You work at the MALL you little twit!”

Oh, and, feel free to leave a comment. 🙂

With acknowledgment to Dave:
Flight: LGA -> CLT,
Time: 9:00PM EST
Position: 1 hour 21 minutes from destination
Altitude 24,500 feet enroute to 30,000
58 Souls on board
Seat 12A

I watch a cumulus cloud float by through the molded plastic window of a Canadair Regional Jet. The tiny double pane window is, as normal, streaked with grime but provides a decent view anyway. The cloud is about two miles away and, in the way that they do, just hangs there as we wander past. I don’t know our speed but it’s not much more than 200 knots at a guess. The cloud has hung there for awhile as we inch along

Looking across the plane I can see out the windows to the west. The sun has already set and a smooth layer of clouds stretches darkly to the horizon 10,000 feet below us. Layered bands of color stretch up toward the heavens in colors that could only be created by the original Artist. Red, Orange, Gold, Peach, Wheat, Blue, Black. A mixed up rainbow of colors stretching north to south, occasionally decorated with high black clouds.

15 or 20 miles away I see the great anvil shape of a thunderstorm launching itself thousands of feet out of the cloud deck. From here it looks lower than us but I know that it’s not. The top stretches well above the horizon. It’s an old aviators rule of thumb: Things below the horizon are below you while things above the horizon are above you regardless of how they “look”. It’s a neat trick and handy in the case of thunderstorms.

Looking back out my window, another cloud hangs in the distance eight or 10 miles to the east and I watch lightening flash inside it. In time, it too passes into the darkness. The ride is perfectly smooth here with only the very occasional “clear air” bumps

Out the left side of the plane I can see the ground. The front that’s creating the clouds to the west is somewhere beneath us. Lights shine up through thin clouds that look more like fog or haze. Cities and towns float by with lazy slowness sometimes thousands or hundreds of thousands of lights clustered together, sometimes a few hundred clustered along a road, sometimes just one at some lonely place in the wilderness. The wilderness which we sometimes forget exists here on the east coast. I don’t know the names of the towns, I don’t recognize the cities. They’re just America passing by slowly in the night.

I’ve seen the same clusters all across this country from both land and air. They’re the places we call “flyover country” when we get so absorbed with ourselves that we forget that all of America isn’t brick and steel and glass. When we forget that while YOU might have a problem with overpopulation, *I* don’t. There are millions of square miles of those places all across America. I can see several hundred square miles out my window now and only see a few lights shining in the night. A very few. This will continue, off and on for the next hour. There’s more unpopulated land than populated. A lot more. I wonder if my neighbors notice and a quick glance around shows that they do not. They are absorbed in magazines that tell them of the true plight of our socially irresponsible nation or captivated by glamor shots in the latest newsstand sensation. A few people read the ubiquitous “Sky Mall” checking out all of the cool toys that they can buy while in flight. None of them look out the window to see for themselves. It’s dark out there… what’s to see?

As I type the engines grow quiet and the nose drops as the pilot begins our decent. The Flight Attendant announces that it’s time to turn off all electronic devices. I do and frown at the weenie across the aisle that tucks his ipod a little deeper into his pocket. His iPod won’t crash the plane but the principle of the matter annoys me.

As we approach the airport I plant my face against the window and watch Charlotte pass underneath us. Like most pilots I play the “spot the airport” game to try and find our destination before we turn final. This time I find two of the three airports but miss CLT itself. After a day in NYC and a completely packed flight on a regional jet I’m tired of people. I have one more hurdle of glass and brick and steel and then a thirty minute drive to my own little light in the darkness. I’m nearly home again and I feel it to my core.

Michael Jackson is dead this week. Tragic. It was unexpected and unexplainable… people WANT answers!

Farrah Fawcett also died this week. When she reached the pearly gates St. Peter said to her. “Farrah, you have done so much good in the last months of your life that I will ask God to grant you a final wish. What do you desire the most?” To this Ms Fawcett replied, simply, “Please ask Him to save the children” …

There’s your answer…

Lately work has been driving my life. I generally don’t like that. I don’t like it even now but brief forays into workaholic mode are sometimes required. This round is particularly bad timing though. Last weekend Rob and I drove to Louisiana to pick up my nephew to come spend some of the summer with the wife and me. This week is his first week staying at our house for any length of time by himself and most of what he sees of me is the bottoms of my feet… I’ll explain.

I work from home and I work a lot. Between 12 and 20 hours a day most days. Never less than 12 hours on a week day. Since I work from home I have a bit of latitude in how my office is arranged. My “office” is what was originally a “sitting room”. It has a gas fireplace in one corner and the doorway opens into the hallway near the living room. As you enter the room, immediately to the left is a bookshelf. The book shelf contains all manner of geek stuff from books to toys to cables to 10 year old pieces of hardware that will never work again but… might be useful… someday. Directly in front of the door way is my desk which faces it. Behind the desk is a pair of large windows that look out into the North Carolina forest not twenty feet away. To the right of the doorway is a folding couch which only gets used at naptime when friends are visiting with kids but which also works nicely for a catch all. Between the desk and the couch is the gas fireplace which takes up most of that corner. Like the couch, it never gets used but it has a nice mantle which holds my nicer geek toys. It’s not a big room but everything mostly fits.

The desk in my office is a six foot folding table. On the “desk” are three 21″ high resolution flat screen monitors arranged side by side. As I face the monitors the one on the right is my home computer. It always has a web browser running in it so that I can look up things that the office wouldn’t normally allow. The monitor on the left is dedicated to my work laptop. It’s always connnected to work and I’m always keeping an eye on it. The monitor in the center can switch between either the home computer or the work computer so that whichever one I’m working on at the time is spread across two screens. In total there’s about four feet of monitors. To the left of the monitors sits my laptop with its screen open… something else to watch. I can’t see over the monitors so when I’m behind my desk I can’t see anything in the other room or anything in the room I’m in. I’m hidden back here all day, every day. My only escape is to turn around and look out the window… it’s quite an escape. Of course, I can always find time for a quick break to wander around outside for a bit. But mostly, I’m here behind my wall of light. My phone is to my right on a plastic storage box. I have a speaker phone as well as a portable phone with a headset. I can, on occasion, join a conference call, put the headset on and wander out to the hammock in the yard for an hour to listen in. Those chances are rare but nice.

Behind the “desk” is my chair. I love my chair. It is a full size, I kid you not, Lay-Z-Boy recliner. Big sucker too. I had to set the table up on bricks to get it high enough. Talk about being Redneck? Not only are my cars on blocks, my computers are too! Both my keyboard and mouse are wireless so there are no cords to get in the way. The keyboard goes in my lap and the mouse works fine on the big arm of the chair. The chair swivels and is close enough to the desk that the arms are nearly under the table. I sit down, swivel to face the monitors and hit the recliner lever. Up go my feet, and I push the back about halfway into full recline. If I get tired I can lean back and rest for a bit.

Regardless… anyone walking past my office will see a wall of monitors and my feet sticking out from under the other side of the desk. Not a terribly exciting sight for someone that rode 950 miles to see you.

I’ve been transitioning to a new job at work. It’s a very good move from me and gets me away from the “direct support” role that I’ve been doing for the past two years back into “real” work with an Architecture group. It was a nice vacation but now it’s time to get back to work. The problem is that my old role hasn’t been filled yet and I’ve been pushing like crazy to do both jobs because I don’t want to leave the old team hanging. After six weeks of working two jobs for one salary I’m over that. I have two major tasks to finish off with the old role. Both will complete in the next two weeks and then I’m done with’em. It’s a relief.

That is, of course, a passive way of saying, “I haven’t had time for blogging!”

At work yesterday I was telling one of my coworkers about my wine making exercise of a few weeks ago. In the process I came to understand a frustration that I had with when I made that first batch. You see Vintners are, for the most part, jerks. They write up recipes and techniques in such a way as to imply that these are the ONLY way to do things and anything not to that standard isn’t worth drinking. They go into great detail and turn the whole thing into a big science project. They’ll talk about specific gravity and hydrometer and starting and finishing and fining and… good lord! I just wanted to make my own bottle of wine and it’s all so complicated as to be undoable, I almost gave up before I started. My coworker was in the process of giving up in the same way.

So here’s my nod to Vintners, ya’ll make consistently good wine. Good for ya.

And here’s my nod to back country, back woods, redneck wine makers, ya’ll do too but you need internet access.

I had a bit of a leg up on the process. My Uncle has been making wine for many many years. He makes consistently good wine. Very good. He uses an old water battle, bread yeast and piece of rubber siphon hose. I knew it could be done without all of the fancy equipment because I’ve seen it done. A quick think on the process and you’ll realize that people have been making wine out of fruits for the last 5000 years or so without the aid of these new fangled chemistry sets. Of course, they made a lot of vinegar in the process but if you get over that being the ultimate failure in wine making you can do a pretty good job of it. So, what’s the trick of it? How did those billions of bottles of wine get made over the years without the aid of a hydrometer? I asked my uncle a similar question and his answer was simple. It was, “Well, I reckon that we’ve all had a glass or two of good wine. Of course, we’ve all had a few glasses of not so good stuff too. You just taste what you’re making and adjust it so’s it’s good.” Brilliant. Using this method my first batch of wine came out fantastic. I mean, fantastic to the point of people being genuinely surprised when I hand them a glass of it. The wine is only a month old and it’s damned good if you ask me or anyone else that I’ve had try it. I made it in my kitchen without fancy tools and without the high dollar equipment. It’s good enough that I want to share the method with folks.

Hop over to Jinksto’s Redneck Wine Makin’ guide and see what you think. If you have questions or comments leave them here… I don’t think you can comment on that page.

Imagine, if you will, four friends sitting around a picnic table at the edge of a lake. They all have different levels of relationships. Two are brothers, two are best friends, two went to high school together twenty years ago, two just met, two went to war together, two are married, two are divorced. Different people, different histories, all from Louisiana, all confident enough that they aren’t afraid to just hang out, relax and enjoy good company. The ones that can, talk about old times. The ones that can’t, talk about things that are happening in the world or their peripheral relationships to the other’s stories. On the table are two empty bottles. One of Captain Morgan Private Stock Rum; one of Appleton 12 year old rum.

Many of the old stories revolve around those empty bottles and hundreds… maybe thousands more like them. There are two other bottles there. One a fifth of Captain Morgan Silver Rum and one of a no-name bottom shelf rum. One is half empty; the other unopened. They’re on the way to joining their voided cousins. Occasionally a fifth of cheap mexican tequila will appear from a nearby cooler. A toast to friends new and old is birthed from its amber depths and it’s returned to it’s icy cradle for later. A beer or two slide around the table to wet the thirst that heavy drinking brings. Empty cans litter the table.

On a nearby park grill a pork loin wrapped in foil cooks slowly over an open fire. There’s no work to do here tonight. The pork will simmer in it’s own juices and cook through. It doesn’t need to be touched or turned. Just left to occasionally release tiny bursts of steam that disperse and float lightly on the almost still breeze to remind them that something good awaits. It’ll be hours before it’s done but they’ve tasted it before. They know it’ll be first rate. These boys are all from Louisiana… it would be a shock if it turned out less than spectacular.

A radio plays quietly from a nearby camp chair. From it pours gold from a different era. Rebels music for men beyond trying to impress one another with rebellion. The music reminds them of a harder life… and an easier one. It prompts as many stories as the bottles do as random bits of music break through purposefully fogged minds to remind them.

A light, warm rain starts late in the evening. The rum soaked men sit for a few seconds not wanting to leave the warm embrace of too much rum and good company. The rain sizzles as it lands on the nearby foil but the fire remains steady and warm. As one, they decide that it’s not worth the effort of setting up the canopy that one of them has brought along. Perhaps another night when it’s cooler or the rain is harder but not tonight. Tonight it’s warm and the rain freshens minds. It prompts stories of it’s own. One of the men pulls an empty trashbag over the radio and others tuck away cigarettes or pipes… keeping them dry but handy. The rain will stop in a few minutes, it always does this far south on nights like this. For now though, it’s nice.

The night grows long with friends talking. The rain becomes a memory, another story to tell. The pork is sliced and left to lay on it’s opened foil allowing for little pieces to be pulled off and tasted almost if one need prove again throughout the night that it was really that good. It was.

Another drink is passed, another shot of tequila raised in toast. Crickets provide melody almost in time with the music. Frogs croak in random and stark contrast to it. A bass jumps into the still night far out on the lake.

One by one the men stand and fade away into the night. They’ll take a few Advil and drink down a big bottle of Gatorade to top off the night. They’ve done this before. They’ll wake without hangovers… barely tired from the night. Years of practice have brought them here. Years of learning, yearning and pain. For now, it’s enough to be happy and free.

I am the last one left this night. I don’t want to leave my chair near the fire. It is comfortable and warm but another day awaits. Another night like this one will come tomorrow. I turn the radio off and smile quietly as I lift the shade on the oil lamp and blow it out. The night fades to black and I fade with it.