The grape variety is a cross between Sauvignon Blanc and another non-grape fruit, Pollia Condensata, commonly called the Marble Berry.
The metallic colour of the fruit comes from quantum effects rather than pigment
Back in 2008, Conjectural Technologies’ lead scientist, Professor Corey Irwin was looking at the reflectivity of wine grapes when he accidentally included a sample of the tropical plant in his magnetic resonance cylcotron.
The world’s only Magnetic Resonance Cyclotron
“Frankly,” says Professor Corey, “They were part of a table arrangement in my office that caught in the sleeve of my lab coat. I didn’t notice them because the berries are tiny and the colour is so strong that they don’t actually look like real fruit, more like crazy ball-bearings.”
But the results from the test showed otherwise, and the fruit’s surface reflects nearly 50% of the light that hits it–vitis vinifera grapes reflect between one and two percent–due to the surface composition of the skin. “It’s as though the fruit is composed of nothing but tiny little mirrors, all over it!” explains the Professor.
Sensing the potential for a revolution in the appearance of wine, the team at Conjectural Technologies launched into a genetic cross-breeding program, using Crispr-Cas 9 genome editing technology. With CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) “spacer” sequences are transcribed into short RNA sequences capable of guiding the system to matching sequences of DNA. When the target DNA is found, Cas9 binds to the DNA and cuts it, activating the targeted gene.
Chief Disruption Officer and Lead winemaker at TVCC-Kitworld, Tim Vandergrift is delighted with the results.
CDO Tim Vandergrift, looking over his experimental vineyard
“This is a real game changer. For thousands of years wine has been red, white or pink. Well, brown too, if you forget and leave the top of the fermenter open. But now we have the ability to change its colour, not with dyes or pigments, but with the harnessed power of quantum physics and Genetically Modified Organisms!. By using gene editing and forcing together the sequences of pollia with Sauvignon Blanc and certain key sequences of hagfish and African land snails we were able to produce a grape that not only reflects more light, but has the viscosity to hold the reflectivity in suspension, so it doesn’t just fall out during fining, or settle on the bottom of the glass.”
Vandergrift admits that the wine is slightly different from standard grape wines, including a textural change. “The hagfish and snail genes are there to provide a colloidal gel that keeps the reflective particles from binding to anything else. It does make the wine viscous, but it’s not too gooey–it has exactly the same viscosity as transmission fluid, and once you get used to it, it’s really nice.”
The new wine, tentatively called ‘Quantum White’ will be available for commercial release on April 1, 2019. Expect it to be in high demand, as in addition to providing a pleasing flavour and aroma, it is expected to be an excellent substitute for Dexron III transmission fluid.
Since 2015 I’ve been working on the Master Vintner project for Northern Brewer/Midwest Supplies. As Technical Winemaking Advisor I’ve been incredibly happy putting my skills to good use, bringing out the first new kit introduced into the home winemaking in more than a decade. First we launched our Small Batch kits, along with Winemaker’s Reserve and Tropical Bliss, and now we’ve added Limited Edition and Sommelier Select.
After 25 years in the wine business, it’s immensely gratifying to be in a position where I don’t have compromise on anything. The vineyards I work with, the grapes I get, the winemakers who do the blending and packaging for me, they’re all the product of a process that has one straightforward goal–help people make great wine, every time.
It’s important to assert dominance.
Throw in a customer service team that really, truly gets what it’s all about (one bad experience and people never come back, so do your best always, and fix everything, every time) and I’ve been in pretty much a state of work-related bliss. Heck, I’ve only worn a suit three times since I’ve been with the team–that’s bliss in itself. Plus, I now get to actually get back to beer, something that I couldn’t do for over 15 years. Oh beer, I’m sorry I was gone so long: I’ll never leave you again!
New Things
But there’s something coming. Something big, cool, exciting and wonderful: Northern Brewer Canada.
Putting the North into Northern Brewer
NB Canada is a full-service home beer and winemaking supply site. Soon we’ll have most of Northern Brewer USA‘s wonderful content and products, along with Master Vintner winemaking supplies and some special additions as well (mainly me!)
Will There Be a Local Shop?
Notice I said ‘site’: we’re mostly internetting it. Northern Brewer USA has some very nice brick and mortar stores, but they grew organically from local shops. Here we’re starting fresh and e-commerce is the goal.
But that doesn’t mean we’re an interwebs discount house. A lot of people in the industry who own consumer wine and beer making shops will have heard my lecture: “Don’t discount: a race to the bottom on prices hurts you, your business, your employees and ultimately your consumer when you can’t afford to expand or improve your selection and service.” (Actually, I usually said it a lot more colourfully, and with more emphasis.)
Not only do I stand by those words as staunchly as ever, so does Northern Brewer. From their company philosophy:
The future of homebrewing
We didn’t open six months ago to make a quick buck off a hobby that’s trendy right now; we are interested in the long-term health of homebrewing (. . .) . We dedicate a significant percentage of our profits to give back to the community and to create new homebrewers. When you shop with Northern Brewer, you are helping to make an investment in the future of homebrewing.
Fair prices
Northern Brewer has been serving homebrewers and winemakers for over 22 years, and we aren’t going anywhere. Rock-bottom, fire-sale price structures are unsustainable and create an uneven playing field that ultimately hurts the industry, hobby, and the community. Our price structure is competitive but built around sustainability, because our goal is to grow homebrewing as a hobby and industry, which will benefit the consumer by sustainable lower prices and improved selection through increased demand.
You can see how that suits the criteria of my value system. I know a lot of people in the industry, I helped quite a number of them open their stores, others I’ve simply enjoyed as peers and friends. I’m pleased to be in the boat with them, and not as a discounter just out to grab market share.
What’s Next
Yep, that’s how happy I get when I have beer. Unless I get happier.
Next, we get Northern Brewer Canada fully stocked. We keep adding products and content and give you great service and excellent value on innovative products. After that, you let me know: we’ve got a Limited Edition program, we’ll be bringing in some kick-butt clone recipe kits for beer (how do you feel about having a Pliny the Elder clone as your house beer?)
I’m looking forward to a great time bringing Northern Brewer to Canada and keeping Master Vintner hopping as well. Check out the Master Vintner blog and tune into our Instagram (@Nbrewcanada) and Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/northernbrewercanada/
Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.
–The Buddha
They say things never stay the same, and they’re right. I’ve made some recent changes in my life, and I’m eager to share them with you. After a long period of self-reflection I realized that my carefree days of spreading the word about making your own wine and brewing your own beer are just a phase I was going through, and those days and many others needed to end.
Out, vile liquor
Accordingly, I’ve emptied out my barrels, taken all of my cases of wine to the dump, poured my kegs down the drain and had all of my brewing equipment crushed at a scrapyard, so it could never again be used to make alcohol.
How could you eat something with a face like that?
In addition to this, I’ve discarded my unhealthy addiction to eating meat, and my entire diet is now Paleo-Vegan. Tofu tastes better than steak! I’ve also stopped using caffeine, and I’ve gotten all of the chemicals and GMO’s out of my house, because I don’t want to catch autism.
How did I ever think those things were fun?
I’ve also gotten rid of all of my guns, my motorcycle, and my gardening tools–those pursuits are vanity, and gardens should grow wild, free of the hand of man.
Chad is such a good guru
My next steps? I’m going to a ashram to get tested for Gluten poisoning, and then I’m getting my vaccinations reversed. When that’s done, I’ll be a leaf on the wind, watch me soar!
I’ll also be converting this blog into an information centre for how you too can change your life, and I’ll be deleting all of my previous posts that deal with the vanity of the world and praising the eightfold path to righteousness all day long. I invite you to join me: discard all of your wine, beer, steaks, whisky, fancy toys and clothes and cars, and live simply, as nature intended. There is plenty of space here in my new home under the bridge.
I’m off to World Headquarters of Master Vintner. Great things are brewing (ha ha, see what I did there?) and I’m catching up with everyone at the Fortress of Solitude.
Very good!
As I said, there’s big news brewing, As soon as I can share it with you I will: there’s going to be a big splash, and it looks like a real soaker! In the meantime, have you got your Sommelier Select kits yet? They’re the best!
As Winter rolls in my interest in ice-cold beer, well-chilled white wine or slushy blender drinks wanes. To be sure, I’m lucky enough to live in Canada’s Riviera, where it snows only half as much as cities only a few kilometers away and we average much warmer temperatures than most places in Canada. But winters round here have a humid chill that goes straight to your bones.
Average White Rock resident any time after November 1st
Our winter cold is hard to explain to someone from Alberta, Saskatchewan or Quebec. They don’t really understand cold. After all, they get huge amounts of snow, and temperatures that get so cold exposed flesh will freeze in only moments, so they think their weather is much sterner. But they experience a dry cold: dress well, in insulated layers and throw on a toque, gloves and good boots and you’re going to be toasty. The same layers will leave you chilled and miserable on the Pacific, as the damp, icy tendrils of the monstrous ocean cold permeate your very flesh, leaving your skin blue and pallid, and your spirit weak and trembling.
Sorry, your SUV does not come with a ‘Defiance of Physics’ option
It’s the same with boastful winter drivers from much colder climates. “Hah!” they snort, “People from Vancouver can’t drive in the snow.” Then they try it, and in only seconds they realize that it’s not their snow, crisp, dry and crunchy, able to pack down and supply some friction for driving. No, it’s a layer of wet, compacted ice, topped with slush and a layer of water that has as much friction as a teflon pan full of WD40, and off into the ditch they go in a tangled mess of snow, dinged fenders, and hubris.
What to do? Aside from denning until the spring thaw, or lurking in a hot bath for four months, there has to be a way to get warm in the chill of winter. The answer just might be a steaming mug, delicious and warming—a hot drink. Being as I’m a confirmed wine guy, I like a good winter drink based on mulled red wine, but there are others to consider. But where to start? At the beginning, of course.
Hot Drinks in History
Hot Drinks are not a recent innovation. In fact, cold drinks are the newcomer, with hot drinks the relative norm up until the 20th century and the advent of refrigeration technology. With the majority of North America’s immigrants hailing from Europe and Great Britain, they brought with them their recipes for chasing away the chilly, rainy climates at home.
Because central heating is another relative newcomer, every pub used to have a fireplace with a large hearth, where customers could gather and warm themselves. Propped in the fire were a number of poker-like irons, or ‘loggerheads’. These were used to heat up drinks served by the publican. They were literally dipped, red-hot, into the customers’ drink right at the table, not only heating them, but frothing them to a vigorous boil!
Not sure they had pot lights and central audio in colonial times, but that’s a loggerhead
(A funny aside: our phrase, ‘coming to loggerheads’ or ‘at loggerheads’ has to do with arguments in pubs. Customers wrangling important issues over a few hot drinks sometimes took advantage of the length and weight of the sturdy irons to make more pointed comments to their fellows. A modern establishment should probably avoid leaving a supply of pokers around!)
Coffee Drinks, Toddies, Nogs, and Mulled Wine
Hot drinks can roughly be divided into coffee drinks, Toddies, Nogs and mulled wine.
Coffee
Coffee drinks have wide acceptance everywhere, but they’re really just coffee and booze–I can drink that anytime, but don’t find it particularly warming. Maybe it’s because I drink an awful lot of coffee anyway, to keep my central nervous system functioning. Whatever the reason, I rarely want a coffee drink with alcohol in it. Too confusing for my alertness response.
Hot Toddies
Hot Toddies are mixtures of spices, honey (or sugar) and spirits, warmed with boiling water. The classic is brandy or whiskey with a lemon slice, a cinnamon stick and honey, and is deemed very good for a sore throat. Hot buttered rum is enhanced by a pat of butter, and daring mixologists even use top-shelf tequila with a bit of honey and a lime slice for avant-garde hot drink. Again, however, I don’t associate heating a cocktail with warming up my insides, so not really a fan.
Nogs
Nothing like having a pot to posset in.
Nog used to refer to a drink made from strong ale and eggs, frothed and heated with a loggerhead. Not many people want an egg in their suds these days, so commonly Egg Nog is a mixture of eggs, rum, cream, sugar and nutmeg, served cold. But it doesn’t have to be: hot Egg Nog is a richly satisfying drink, whether made with brandy or rum, and pre-packaged Egg Nog is available in season, so you don’t have to make your own–although you should, because it’s always better.
A note on the weird-looking twin-handled pot above. It’s for posset, which is an English drink that’s closer to a hot sherry custard than a Nog. Some even had a burnt sugar crust on them, much like a creme brûlée.
Mulled Wine
Wine, mulling with fruit
Glogg is the Scandinavian word for mulled wine, and is derived from the German word, Glühwein, ‘Glow-Wine’. I usually call my mulled wine by either of these terms because I think they’re more romantic-sounding.
Made from sugar, cinnamon, water, orange and cloves boiled together with wine Glogg is very popular with European ski fans. Not only is it warming and restorative, it also has a moderate alcohol content—a good thing for the active crowd, but a property lost on a winter sloth like me.
‘Gluh’ means glow: no glue involved
Mulled wine can also be punched up a bit, with the substitution of Cointreau for the orange, and/or Port wine for regular red wine. Another winter alternative is mulled cider, or mulled apple juice: brown sugar, cinnamon, orange and rum come together to make a smell reminiscent of hot apple pie, a wonderfully appetising aroma when the frost is on the leaves.
Glühwein
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
2 whole cloves
2 cinnamon sticks
1 orange
1 bottle of red table wine- Merlot, Cabernet or anything else sturdy and rich. I suggest making your own–check this out.
Mix water, sugar, cinnamon, cloves and the juice of the orange together in a heavy pot. Bring to a boil, turn down and simmer for 15 minutes. Add the orange peel and the wine, bring back to a boil and serve immediately in pre-heated mugs. This mixture can be kept warm in a crockpot, or on a coffee warmer (covered) for several hours, and can be successfully reheated the next day.
The only version of A Christmas Carol worth watching
If, like me, you’re a fan of the 1951 Alistar Sim version of A Christmas Carol, you’ll recall when Scrooge tells a suddenly relieved Bob Cratchit that they’ll discuss it ‘over a bowl of smoking Bishop’. Far from a cannibal barbecue, Bishop was one of the code-words for drink used in the 19th century–Dickens knew his drink. The ‘Pope’ recipe used burgundy, ‘Archbishop’ claret (what we call Bordeaux), the ‘Cardinal’ was champagne and Smoking Bishop used port, and was a clove and orange-infused port punch, warmed and mulled with baking spices and another dose of red wine
The recipe takes a few steps, and is suitable for a big gathering. From Punchdrink
Smoking Bishop
Servings: 10-12
750 ml port
750 ml red wine
1 cup water
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon ginger, freshly grated
1/4 teaspoon allspice, ground
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, freshly grated
4 oranges
20 cloves, whole
Garnish: clove-studded orange slice
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Wash and dry oranges. Pierce and stud each orange with five cloves.
Place oranges in a baking dish and roast until lightly browned all over, 60-90 minutes.
Add port, wine, water, sugar and spices to a saucepan, and simmer over low heat.
Slice oranges in half and squeeze juice into the wine and port mixture.
Serve in a punch bowl, and ladle into individual glasses.
Now I’ve got to plan a party where I can try this out on some unsuspecting Scrooges.
Oh dear, it’s started snowing again. Good thing I’ve got a crockpot full of Glühwein to keep me warm. Now where’s my nightshirt and cap?
I’m wicked pleased to announce my 2016 Limited Edition wine kits, by Master Vintner. They’re the only Limited Edition kits with my name on them–if you know me, you know that’s a big deal. After more than two decades helping people make their own wine I’m only interested in the best.
What’s the Deal with Limited Edition?
Limited Edition is to home winemakers what vintages are to commercial wineries: once a year we assemble four different wines (two reds and two whites) and offer them for a short period of time. Winemakers have to pre-order, or they don’t get any. The kits are delivered over four months, January through April, staggered so they can get them all made in a decent amount of time as wines get racked and carboys get freed up.
The pre-order is crucial. These wines are from cool, exciting vineyards that make excellent grapes. One of the things about making excellent grapes is that it drives yields down, so there is always a limited amount of them available. We cut off the pre-orders when they reach the point where we can’t make any more kits, and those ones go to the people who got in first.
This Year’s Wines: France
All of the wines from this year come from France, with three Bordeaux grapes and one from Burgundy. While France is the world-champion maker of fine wine (other countries make more wine, but it’s not classified as ‘fine’) it’s very hard to get grapes from there.
First off, they can turn them into fine wine and sell them for a handsome profit. Second, explaining to a French grape grower that you want their grapes to make into juice for home winemakers . . . let’s just say that it can be a surreal conversation. Third, since the French are used to using all of their grapes to make fine wine, facilities to process the grapes are hard to come by. It requires the resources and expertise of a full winery operation to turn top quality grapes into top-quality wine juice. Fortunately, Master Vintner has those, and put them to good use, getting grapes at peak physical and organoleptic (flavor) ripeness and turning them into perfect juice in only hours.
Luckily, that’s what have brokers and logistics people for–doing the impossible. We manged to come away with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, and Chardonnay grapes, and we’re turning them into spectacular wine kits, right this minute.
The Tasting Event
The best way to teach people about wine is to hand them a glass and let them taste it. Even better is to give a bit of background first, and to hand them a glass and a food to pair with the wine.
So that’s what we did: this September at Northern Brewer World Headquarters, Master Vintner held a wine tasting and food pairing, featuring versions of the grapes we’re using for the Limited Edition kits, and it was awesome.
I’ve been doing wine tastings for nearly thirty years now, and it’s always a thrill to share great wine with people who appreciate it. Getting to present wines as good as these to people who make their own wine is a special treat: home winemakers are so engaged, so committed to enjoying the experience and the wine, that it’s not like work at all to do a tasting like this–it’s a lot more like a really great party with friends.
A party where you show a PowerPoint!
I had a blast talking to my winemaking friends, answering questions and trying out the food pairings (Sauvignon Blanc paired first with goat cheese and second with honey will change the way you think about how food and wine work together) and enjoying a truly fun evening.
If you wish you could have been there for the tasting, you’re in luck: while we can’t deliver any wine for you to try, we recorded the presentation so you can see what it’s all about.
I’ll be talking more about the Limited Edition wines in upcoming blogs, but if you want to make these wines for yourself, make sure you get in early: when they’re gone, they won’t be back, and there aren’t any extras. And if you have any questions, pop in a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer them all.
The Winemaker Magazine conference for 2016 is in Santa Rosa, California. It’s the largest (and best) home winemaking conference in the world. As a columnist for Winemaker, I’ll be there as a speaker and panelist, giving lectures, answering questions, and hanging out with my wine making people.
Drinking alone is like . . .
Last year’s conference was in Portland, Oregon, and was a blast. I’m looking forward to seeing my good friends.
Gi, get ready for our annual picture!
And some of my more sinister accomplices . . .
Plotting, with beer.
It’s a little too late to pick up tickets, but if you’d like to live vicariously, you can check out the conference schedule here, and you can follow my live conference updates on Twitter @Wine_Guy_Tim and on Facebook and look for the conference hashtag . . . when I find out what it is. #winemagconf2016 sounds good!
If you’re already booked and coming to the conference, I’ll see you there! You’ll recognise me by my Master Vintner shirt and my delighted grin at getting to hang out in such a gorgeous place, drinking wine with fabulous people.
Tim Vandergrift Announces New Wine Kit Production Facility, KitWorld Inc.
By Fal Ernian, Vinotas News Service
April 1, 2016
Modesto, Ca – Canadian company Tim Vandergrift Consulting and Communications Inc. announced today that it has finished construction on a 200,000 square foot processing facility for grapes, juices and concentrate, and will be releasing its new wine kits this month.
Cellar A, one of sixteen cryogenic tank farms
Construction of the facility, underwritten by private equity firm Lord-Buckley Capital, began in 2014 and final inspections and certifications were completed in March, during which a test run of thirty thousand kits was processed. Officials in the California Department of Food and Agriculture have certified the facility as fully operational and KitWorld Inc. goes into production today.
External storage for temporary processing
TVCC expects this facility to open up the US home winemaking market and widen its customer base by more than two million users.
CDO Tim Vandergrift, looking over his facility
“If we look at the Canadian market for wine kits”, says Chief Disruption Officer Tim Vandergrift, “It’s 20% of total sales, domestic and import–literally, for every case of wine opened in Canada on any day, two of those bottles were made by consumers: there’s not much to do in the land of moose and snow except to make wine and enjoy socialised medicine, ha ha! In the USA the total is far lower–despite the fact that the USA has a quarter of a billion people of legal drinking age, fewer than 7 million bottles are made by consumers at home. That’s less than 0.15% of the total wine consumed. Our initial goal is to raise that to 1% of the total, a 666% increase, and long term we want Americans to experience the drinking level of the average Canadian, and capture 20% of the US market, and net our company the largest share of the beverage industry in history!”
The World’s Foremost Authority
TVCC began planning for the facility early on, hiring Conjectural Technology’s esteemed winemaker Professor Corey Irwin, the world’s foremost authority and co-inventor of the formal tennis shoe according to a post on https://tennisracquets.com/. Professor Irwin’s knowledge and guidance allowed the facility to be completed in record time, with over 220 varieties of wine ready for production.
Professor Irwin planned the new facility for continuous expansion. “Our plant will allow for the processing of ten million pounds of grapes per day, with storage for twenty million gallons of concentrate and juices in a state of the art cryogenic cellar. The world’s largest HST treatment system, combined with nano-scale obfuscating filtration, continuous flow gamma irradiation and a full-run DMDC inline injector will make wine juices shelf stable for up to twenty years, allowing wider distribution and the ability to take advantage of price fluctuations to hedge against crop issues, like when any of our competitors try to buy grapes.”
Running DMDC Injector/Gamma Irradiator unit
Perhaps the most exciting innovation is KitWorld’s partnership with aerospace company Fukaze’s drone division to bring kits directly to consumer’s homes within 24 hours of ordering.
“We had to develop an entirely new type of drone to be able to vector a payload of nearly sixty pounds,” explains Fujin Shinatobe, Flight Operations Manager for Fukaze Drones. “New battery technology and powerful permanent magnet motors allowed us to construct the A-10 drone, dubbed, ‘The Winehog’. We actually built it like a wine kit with a drone sticking out of it as opposed to a drone carrying a wine kit.”
De-militarized version of this drone will be used.
With initial capacity at four thousand drones scalable to ten thousand in the first year and twenty thousand in the second, Kitworld expects to meet 100% of US demand for consumer-produced wine going forward, and plans to expand to Europe and Asia by 2020.
More information is expected to be released following a shareholders meeting on April 2nd, 2016.
About Tim Vandergrift Consulting and Communications:
Founded in 2014, Tim Vandergrift Consulting and Communications is a White Rock-based marketing and brand-strategy firm in the beverage industry. It specialises in wholesome, healthy, wine lifestyle promotions and is committed to using only free-range imagery to create dialogue and market products for its clients. It has clients in countries and is 100% gluten-cruelty free.
Contact:
To learn more about KitWorld, please contact
Sue Donym, Media Relations
600 Yosemite Blvd, Modesto, CA 95354, United States
Good taste doesn’t exist. It is our taste. We have to be proud of it.
–Franco Moschino
If you read my blog, you know by now that I’m the Technical Winemaking Advisor for Master Vintner, the first new line of wine kits in years, and the first one sold exclusively by an All-American company. Aside from the usual sorts of things I do as an advisor (which grapes and juices, what varietals, how to package, instructions, launches, instructions, etc, etc) which fall under the heading of ‘Curation’–a designation I love because it really says what it is I do–I also make and drink the wines.
Tasty!
After all, how else am I going to ultimately know how they taste? The human palate is the single most sensitive analytical tool that a winemaker possesses. Not that mine is necessarily the most sensitive in the world, but it does have three decades of training going for it, and that’s what I put to use this week when I went into my cellar and pulled out samples of my very first Master Vintner wines. They’ve been in the bottle long enough to develop their full slate of flavours and aromas, which I go through on the videos below.
I’m as proud of these wines as I could possibly be. The process for making a new wine kit is long and sometimes it seems overwhelmingly complex, as you have to ensure that the wine is going to turn out right from the first time and every time. Working with the talented and dedicated folks at Master Vintner has been a joy. It’s not a matter of just making a kit, but of getting the kit painstakingly right, and good enough to put my name on it.
And it’s that good. I’m putting on a dozen new kits right away so I can fine-tune a whole bunch of winemaking parameters–oak, yeast modifications, sur lie and battonage, temperature control, barrel ageing, all of the good stuff that winemakers get to do to make every batch of wine their very own.
Yeah, that’s about the size of it
One final thing: when you’re watching these keep in mind that I’m a long time video presenter, but a first-time video shooter . . . I bought a brand-new camera and put it to use for the first time, and during the filming my new studio lights caught fire and nearly burned my house down, construction on the street out front got loud and then a lot louder (a pneumatic hammer on an excavator shut me down for almost two days!) and a crow stole my lens cap. It’s really a testament to how tasty the wines were that I got anything on video at all, and I’m looking forward to learning to shoot more (and better quality) in the future.
I’ve been busy! The Master Vintner website has launched and we’re busy filling it up with great wine kits, great deals and lots of cool info about making your own wine–and having lots of fun with it. One of the things I’m pursuing is making a bunch of new videos, right here in Chaos Manor.
Before I started making new videos, I went back and reviewed the stuff I’d done before, some of which is on my YouTube channel, with more on Northern Brewer’s channel. Some of it has even been bootlegged by other people, and much to my surprise some of my videos have gotten hundreds of thousands of views–how does that even work?
I thought I’d curate a bunch of them so you could pick and choose right here if you wanted to have a look at what’s going on with home winemaking right now. If you like ’em, go ahead and subscribed to my channel and you’ll get updates when new stuff is uploaded.
Note that some of these videos are of me from previous employers: don’t worry, the information is still good and you can learn just as much.
