The 1st of July was Canada Day, a day for celebrating this beautiful country of ours. It also meant a long weekend.
It was also an opportunity to catch up with some friends we hadn’t seen in a while. On the Friday we visited J&E on their float home for an indoor picnic (the weather having not cooperated for our planned excursion to the Reifel bird sanctuary).
E and I make wine together. More accurately, I contribute physical labour by carting cases of wine grapes to the crusher, cranking the crusher, and so forth while E provides the equipment, technical know-how and skill. I’ve been participating in the process for a few years now, and it’s been educational. It’s also quite cheap – for under $5 a bottle, including the corks and chemicals for washing the bottles, we’re getting wine that you could expect to pay $10-15 for in the store. This is my excuse for buying wines that are sometimes well upwards of $25-30 – dollar cost averaging! Perhaps I have a future in flogging mutual finds, but I digress.
When he first invited me to play along a couple years ago, I chipped in for some late harvest Muscat from Washington State that produced a mighty fine wine. The year after that, we went a little crazy and produced almost 300 bottles; Gewürztraminer, “Bordeaux blanc”, “Spanish red”, Zinfandel, Zin-Sangiovese, California Sémillon, and a very late harvest Syrah that we turned into pseudo-port. The Sémillon was supposed to be cooking wine, but it turned out to be a very nice drinking wine – and less than $1 a bottle too!
On Friday, I had some “barrel tastings” of last fall’s production: Riesling; Ehrenfelser; Zinfandel; more “Spanish red”; “white” Syrah (a blush wine). The whites are… passable. I have a feeling they’ll become mostly cooking wine. On the other hand, I don’t mind pouring entire bottles of home made wine into what I’m cooking; I certainly wouldn’t want to do that with an $85 bottle of Châteauneuf! The reds though are outstanding! A year or two in the cellar and they’ll be great for casual dining and barbecues.
Saturday we managed to get a lot accomplished without wearing ourselves out and had a nice relaxing day of it. Before bed, I made my famous waffle batter to sit overnight in the fridge.
There’s a restaurant in Victoria called John’s Other Place. Many years ago, I went there for breakfast and had the waffle; what made this one different was a yeast batter. Absolutely fantastic. Thus began a quest to find a yeast based waffle batter. Well, in those days, Google didn’t exist, but I managed to find a recipe that I’ve long since tweaked to make my version of waffle perfection.
So for Sunday morning breakfast, we ate waffles until we hurt. Bliss.
Full of waffle goodness, we then visited my good friend and his family in Surrey and had a very pleasant afternoon in the warm sun (which apparently didn’t manage to burn off the cloud layer in our part of Vancouver).
I sometimes wish every weekend were a long one.
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