I am a great believer in Abraham Kaplan’s The Law of the Instrument: “When you’re carrying a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Currently, my hammer is a wine bottle, and everything looks like it should be bottled!
Here’s how it happened: after a particularly large batch of homemade wine aged to bottling point, I discovered that our large collection of wine bottles (see Reuse Glass Before Recycling It) had dwindled over the past year. Suddenly, I found myself short of 750 ml bottles.
Luckily, friends on the bay had recently married in an event that gathered more than 400 celebrants. I checked, and discovered that they hadn’t hauled out the recycling yet. They were very happy to let me take away all I could. On an extremely rainy afternoon I collected a large pack full, plus an extra case box of corkable empties.
This came after I’d bottled the big batch, so after sterilizing and removing labels from my new stash, I eagerly looked around for wine to bottle, only to realize that nothing else would come due for awhile. To make things worse, I recently bought more corks, and a new filling wand that should prove more reliable than my old one, which wasted too much wine in my opinion.
All these new toys, and nothing to use them for!
I have plenty of batches coming due in the next month or so, but I had to wait for about a week before anything came close to needing to be bottled. I finally got my chance the other day, although I suspect I may have bottled that batch a bit too early. Time will tell. Bottling just one gallon did little more than whet my appetite, and hardly put a dent in the rows of bottles waiting to do their duty in one corner of the cabin.
I was involved in the implementation of a multi mil planning and control system for a California winery before I retired. Corporate had dictated that they install the system. What corporate did not understand was that the little old wine maker calls the shots and tells the plant when to bottle. The last thing those folks needed was a computer system to tell them how to do things.
COMPUTERIZED wine making? The HORROR!