Summer, bottled

Last summer I spent an evening pitting five pounds of cherries (sweet cherries and pie cherries) while watching a really good movie. It was slow going. Five pounds is a lot of cherries -- and the movie was subtitled and fast-paced, so I was trying to pit the cherries by feel alone without looking down at what I was doing. My hands were pretty gory for a few days afterward -- stained reddish-purple -- and my fingernails were horrible.

But it was all worth it for the end result:



















I made an apple wine too, a couple of months before the cherry wine. That was easy -- done with store-bought apple juice. We tried them both this past weekend. The apple wine was sweeter than I expected, but a nice acid balance. The cherry is almost opaque unless you're looking at it with a window behind it. It smells and tastes almost like port (to me anyway) with raisiny, tobacco-y notes to it. Both of them probably need to sit a little longer before they're really ready to drink.

Now I'm doomed -- I want to go out and buy some stuff to I can play with my wine recipes a little more -- check the sugar and alcohol contents and adjust thing. This time I just followed the recipes and let it do its thing. I am full of ideas for what I'd like to make next...