Made it! NaBloPoMo done. Thirty posts in thirty days. And I’m thinking of signing up for December’s challenge, now that NaBloPoMo stroked my ego in the last week by naming Left Coast Cowboys “Blog of the Week”. I’d hoped I’d have some profound insight for this last post of the program, but today was just too full of random things. Starting with a morning that was fogged in like the background of a Da Vinci painting.
Sonoma as seen by Leonardo.
Which was appropriate since we had another Italian style harvest to contend with. You may have thought we were done with harvesting now that all of our grapes have been processed and most are safely in oak where they’ll wait out the better part of a year. Nope, we’ve still got olives to contend with. They were picked Saturday and Sunday, we went down to the community olive press. Even though the Olive Press is at a flashy new winery, Jacuzzi Family Winery, it has the feeling of something from a village in Tuscany from hundreds of years ago. Unless you have a yield of over 500 pounds, your olives go into a community vat. So people from all over Sonoma are trucking their olives down — in trash cans, in pails and even in small tupperware containers — to get a piece of the community press.
You don’t need more than one tree’s worth to participate in the Community Pressing.
If you’ve got less than 500 pounds of olives, yours go in with the community batch! Some of these are ours.
The olives are crushed by the high-tech, new fangled olive press.
The low tech one is just for show.
Then it was time to replant my small kitchen garden. Which isn’t as easy as you’d think. I have The Garden That Does Not Know It is Autumn. In other words, my melons, my cucumbers and my tomatoes, which should be dying out now, are still producing like mad. I finally forced things with the melons and cucumbers, ripped them up and planted fava beans.
If I’d known an old overripe melon was such a fun dog toy, I could have saved hundreds of dollars at the pet store.
Of course melons don’t exactly perform like store-bought toys. They shatter and then there are terrier tears.
The brussels sprouts are almost ready. The tomatoes just won’t quit.
Last item of business was a barrel tasting to see how our wines are coming along.
The good news: a barrel tasting is showing our Mourvedre, Cinsault and Grenache are coming along excellently. Beautiful fruit flavor and starting to get oaky.
The bad news: one of the steel tanks of Mourvedre had its sealed top come loose. Herds of potentially contaminating fruit flies were hovering. Only time will tell if they had an effect.
So that’s it. No grand conclusions. Just more of the same 30 days later. But I’ve signed up for Decembers NaBloPoMo. So stick around and see what develops.
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