Feb 04 2010
The Return of Cousin John’s Yeasts
Cousin John, as you’ll remember from this post, is a purist. He makes wine, but spurning our carefully crafted and specially raised UC Davis yeasts, Cousin John uses whatever is floating in the air. In fact, Cousin John only uses au natural techniques and ingredients to make wine. He’s been known to wander the byways of Sonoma picking wild fruit for fermentation. I’ve even accused him, although I have no hard evidence, of trying to make wine out of roadkill. It’s only a matter of time.
So it’s been great fun to have Cousin John make some of his wine from our grapes using his Stone Age methods. Call it the ultimate control group. Since the Cabernet pressing, which Cousin John did with our old basket press, our two Cabernets have been fermenting side by side — ours in oak barrels, Cousin John’s in glass carboys.
This past weekend, it was time for Cousin John to do another racking of his wine, which made the perfect opportunity for a side-by-side tasting. So who is winning? Our college boy yeasts or Cousin John’s juvenile delinquent yeasts? The jury is still out, but both are tasting quite good. However, I still think a college education, even for wine, gives the edge.

Watching Cousin John rack wine the old fashioned way. With tubes, muscles and carboys. No, I'm not nostalgic for THOSE days.

"Terrier" is a unit of measure around here. After racking, Cousin John has two terriers of Cabernet. Appropriate.
Our first tasting was our Rose, the first Rose we’ve ever made.

The verdict: almost all the residual sugars are gone and it's tasting very, very good.

Then we tapped our Cabernet from the barrels.
Compared with Cousin John’s, ours had fermented out more completely. And the oak of the barrel is adding interesting notes. John’s is still a tiny bit fizzy as residual yeast keeps struggling to the last. But the good fruit is holding up in both.
The verdicts on our other barrels are more mixed. Our predominantly Grenache blend and predominantly Mourvedre blends are tasting very good indeed. But last year’s Mourvedre, which is fermenting on its own, is troubling. Andy was ready to pour it out. It’s been reprieved at the last minute and will have a few more months to redeem itself.

All that "tasting" can really add up. So we took off on a hike to the redwoods to burn off the alcohol.

We saw some mushrooms that looked so toxic, even John, the ultimate forager, wasn't tempted to pick them.

He concentrated instead on trying to determine what animal teeth marks we were seeing on some scattered bones.
Obviously, the thought that a large predator was hanging around, caused me not to get the above picture in very good focus.

But I later did get an in-focus picture of the stump of petrified redwood that John the Baptist found in the creek.

And I managed to do that "fuzzy water" photography technique.
All in all, a successful day of winemaking. I’d say we and our college boy yeasts are ahead at this point. But it’s probably not wise to bet against Cousin John.
We have a great group of English and Scottish friends with whom we usually celebrate what we call the Trifecta of the High Holy Holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. In fact, we have so much fun on these occasions, we’ve been searching for years for other suitably hallowed events on which to gather. Finally, someone recommended 





As buccolic as I make Sonoma out to be, I’m not trying to say it doesn’t have crime or problems. It just seems we have a different kind of crime than the gritty urban crime I’m used to reading about in San Francisco and Oakland. Maybe I’m not clued in to the seamy underbelly of Sonoma, although I do try to keep up. The Crime Report in the Sonoma Index-Tribune is one of the first sections I turn to. That’s where I find gems like the big Saturday night crime spree we had a few months ago when a local deejay showed up drunk and/or high at Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack, proceeded to get into an argument with the owner, smashed one thousand dollars worth of turntables, then ran down the street to Sonoma’s only sushi restaurant and, for good measure, punched the owner in the face. We were all talking about that one for weeks. Last Friday night, three taggers were caught in the act of defacing the feedstore and, in Tuesday’s edition, the crime was still being hashed out on the front page.





When you are The World’s Most Beautiful Baby, one party is not enough to celebrate your birth. 

San Francisco is not only full of wild and wonderful human characters, it’s also home to some of the most unique dogs in the world who often outstrip the humans in individuality. One of them is Otto the Wonder Dog who I met through his human companion, Ed, at one of my photography classes. Otto is a strange and serendipitous mixture — some Terrier, maybe some Beagle, perhaps some Lab. But his most amazing talent is his healing ability. Read Ed’s post, 

![Validate my RSS feed [Valid RSS]](http://leftcoastcowboys.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/valid-rss.png)


