Wine-Making #3, Dateline Murvica

Saturday, 9/19

Today's the day! A clear, sunny day. The good red grapes have been
sitting in a vat in Murvica, near Bol, for a week now, fermenting and
getting mashed and stirred daily by Ivo's neighbor/ wine master.

Now we open the spigot and watch the beautiful stuff gush out. This is
the easy part: we just transfer the new wine by hand from the rubber
vat to a stainless steel . . . ummm, canister (I'll have to find out the
correct term). Beautiful, beautiful. We fill the 320 liter canister
almost half way like this. (1)

Then the harder part. We assemble an old Yugoslavian wine press, pack
in some of the grape mash left behind in the rubber vat, screw down the
lid, and start crankin'. Ivo, Spiro and I take turns. When we are done
pressing and straining all the mash, the stainless container has about
300 liters of rich red wine. (2)

The stuff that's left in the press is incredibly dry and packed tight.
We break it apart and pack it back in the rubber bags that we used to
collect the grapes here. Spiro will take these and have rakija (brandy)
made this winter. (3)

We celebrate by drinking a little of the young wine. Yummy. It will be
ready to start drinking in earnest after Christmas.

After cleaning the equipment, I go for a pre-Equinox skinny-dip at the
beach below Ivo's little villa. I don't realize that this is a naturist
beach until I notice the couple at the other end and the boat of young
people approaching as I am leaving.

On the drive home, we stop by an old friend of Ivo's who also has a very
nice villa above the sea on this south part of the island. (This is
actually Alexa, the guy who sold me Bella Bijela a couple of years ago.
And I am with Spiro, the guy who purchased her from me this year.)
Sitting on his patio, under a grape arbor, and shaded by almond trees,
we eat fresh almonds, drink homemade brandy, and talk about tuna fishing
and hunting wild pigs on the mountain, Vidova Gora.

We return home by climbing a gravel road that relentlessly switches back
and forth right up the side of the mountain while the little vineyards
sloping to the sea disappear in the distance below us.

Now it's Monday, 9/21, and I am back to working on my roof. But
Equinox is a'comin' then time for a swim.