For some reason I always manage to make an excellent turkey, but one thing that made things special this year is that most of the herbs in the stuffing, a butternut squash side dish, and the wine was home grown and home made.
The wine–well, it’s the usual grapes from out back that I made in 2005 but just neglected after it’s final racking so it sat in two jugs for two years until this summer when I needed the 5-gallon containers for the new wine. It looked a little brownish and it seemed a bit harsh so I wasn’t as careful to save as much of it as possible when I bottled it.
It’s likely the best–or nearly the best, the raspberry was probably the best–wine I’ve ever made, though it doesn’t taste like a dry wine. It tastes like sherry. It’s very good and the only reason I can come up with that it does is that even though I didn’t use flor sherry yeast and didn’t get the flor on the top, a small exposure to air and light evidently did send it on its way towards becoming sherry, and it has mellowed in the bottle these last three months.
Now I wish I hadn’t been so hasty in dumping it as I got near the bottom sediment.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Happy Thanksgiving. :o)