I’m an authority on consumer-produced alcohol beverages, what most folks refer to as ‘homemade’ wine, beer, mead, sake. For more than two decades I helmed the Technical Services department for first one and then the other of the world’s largest consumer beverage companies (RJ Spagnol’s and Global Vintners). ‘Technical Services’ makes it sound like I was in IT, but it was the only title that really fit the job I did. Mainly I talked, lectured and wrote about wine and beer making, wine, kit wine technology and applications, and anything else that people will sit still and listen to, and I did promotions and marketing and helped design and set up homebrew shops and On-Premise operations across Canada and the USA.
Nowadays I’m an independent consultant to the industry, doing much the same things as before, but as a freelance type guy–I’m always late for work and my boss is a slave-driver.
My usual writing style is pretty loose, and I can never stay on topic (my wife says I have undiagnosed ADD) so if you’re reading here, please join me in hoping for the best. I’ll be blogging about stuff I’m doing, beer, wine, food, cooking, drinking, eating . . . come to think of it, if you can ferment it, cook it, eat it, or drink it, I’ll pretty much be interested in it. Label me a professional hedonist, I think it fits.
The wheel of the year rolls on, and it’s hjól. Whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah or other midwinter and religious festivals may the season bring you blessings and the new year challenges and joys.
I’m off to a family dinner tomorrow, which should be crazy with the fun. I’m looking forward to a big helping of turkey.
Well, it’s stuffed, I guess.
My personal celebration involves a quiet 24th with a nice meal and the ritual viewing of Scrooge (the Alastair Sim version is the only one worth watching) and a wee nip of Tim’s special recipe egg-nog.
Stay safe, stay warm, and remember to hold your loved ones close, and a happy yuletide to you.
One full equipment kit, three extra Big Mouth Bubblers and three extra wine kits!
How happy am I? I’m ecstatic! How proud am I of the Master Vintner project? So proud that I put my name right on the box!
My mother is so proud!
I’ve been working with my friends at Northern Brewer for the last year to make this happen. It’s been an amazing time, and a lot of fun working with the crew there. Designing a new wine kit might seem easy at first blush. After all it’s just a matter of putting some stuff in a box and a bag of grape juice and away you go.
Only not really: there’s a lot of logistical and technical issues that need to be solved. Ordering grape materials has to precede the harvest by months in order to ensure you get the best of the vineyard. Then you need to formulate, get the juices cold stabilised and ready to blend, make and test blends (like all wineries, kit manufacturers blend for character and consistency) and then test your packaging protocols to make sure they will arrive to customers in good condition.
Beyond that, it’s a whole new world of equipment, specific to the 1 US-gallon size, that needs to be integrated to make sure it works well together and makes the best wine possible. Lucky for me there’s a great team doing the sourcing and manufacturing, making me look good!
It’s like a treasure chest for winemakers
My Master Vintner equipment and supplies arrived this week and I got cracking right away. Step one, unbox and check the contents.
All present and accounted for!
The equipment kit contains almost everything you need to make a one US-gallon (5-bottle) batch of wine. You’ll have to supply the wine bottles, which can be saved from the recycling (hurrah environment!) and labels, which are fun to make for yourself.
The first step is to read the equipment list, make sure everything is there–pretty much a sure thing from Northern Brewer. Next, we need to pull out our wine kit and check out that puppy. The first one I laid hands on was a Merlot.
Small package? Good thing!
California Merlot is going to be rich and soft, with warm berry and dark cherry fruit and supple tannins. Mmm!
Next, let’s take a look at the ingredients, and most especially the instructions.
The good stuff
The wine kit has yeast, finings, stabilisers and a fabulous set of well-written and lucid instructions (yes, I wrote them).
Hi-yo Mylar! It’s shiny, but I’m more interested in those brilliant instructions
I dove into making the kit immediately, but that’s only because I wrote (and re-wrote, and edited and re-wrote) the instructions myself. Everyone else should immediately put everything back in the box, seal it up and sit down and carefully and slowly read the instructions from beginning to end–if you’re not sure of anything, don’t start until you get it straight!
But don’t worry about that too much: ultimately, if you can make a cup of coffee or a bowl of cereal, you’re qualified to make your first batch of wine without any problem–I promise.
After reading the instructions, the first step is to mark off Little Big Mouth at the one-gallon line. LBM’s aren’t pre-marked because it’s a tricky process, and some folk’s jugs might not be completely standard, or the markings might get altered in shipping and handling. Better to do it in your own winemaking area so you’re confident you’ve got it right.
The best way to do it is to fill your gallon jug right up to the neck, about two fingers below the tippy-top.
Any fingers will do: mine are fat, but skinny fingers work equally well.
You then pour the jug into your LBM.
Note the water mixing with Oxygen Cleanser in the bottom of the LBM.
Because the next step is to get things clean and sanitised (cleanliness is next to goodliness for winemaking), I put my winemaking cleaner right into the LBM, to save a step. The Oxygen Cleanser included in the equipment kit a great product–you can’t use home cleaners because they have too much perfume and other weird chemicals, which can leach into the wine and leave strange flavours.
Next step is to mark off the 1-gallon level. I used some white Duct Tape and a permanent marker.
That’s the spot.
And then it’s into the sink with the other items needed for day one: hydrometer and test jar, wine thief, lid, spoon, bung and airlock.
Scrubbing and soaking, the Tim Vandergrift way
While the equipment comes brand-new, so it’s not stained or dirty, it’s still a good idea to give it a very good cleaning before you use it–just like you would any new plates, glasses or cups you brought into your kitchen.
After a 20 minute soak and a scrub to remove all surface debris, I rinsed everything thoroughly and then sanitised with a metabisulphite solution.
Now that’s a product shot
Metabisulphite solutions are the second part of cleaning and sanitising. While Oxygen Cleanser leaves your equipment clean enough to eat off of, it’s not ready to use for winemaking. For that you need to treat the surfaces with a solution that will suppress bacterial activity, and in winemaking the easiest stuff to use is a solution of three tablespoons (50 grams) of crystalline sulphite powder in 4 litres (one gallon) of water. Note that absolute accuracy isn’t crucial here, because you’re shooting for a solution that will yield 1250 Parts Per Million of free sulphite and the difference between one gallon and 4 litres or three tablespoons and 50 grams won’t move it more than a few dozen PPM.
I didn’t take any pictures of sulphiting the equipment because a) I didn’t know how to make that look exciting, and b) I always have a spray bottle of the stuff under the counter and I just grabbed it and sluiced everything down, waited 5 minutes and rinsed. By the time I remembered I was photoblogging I had already started the wine. Whoopsie. In any case, I went on to the next step, grabbing the bag of winemaking concentrate.
Grey and wrinkled, but still has a sparkle, like the winemaker
The caps on these bags fit extremely tight–they have to to exclude oxygen and spoilage organisms. If you’ve got long fingernails, or issues with grip strength (which is to say, if you’re not built like an ogre like me) you can pry them up with the edge of a butter knife (nothing sharp, please!) or use a bottle opener on the edge (works like a charm) or invest in a bag decapper. This doohickey fits exactly over the standard cap and levers it off in a jiffy.
Works like a charm, and saves that manicure
Fortunately for me, I am built like an economy-version ogre, so I just pull it straight off. I am also good with opening pickle jars and other applications of brute-force and ignorance.
Yoink!
Careful, though: the juice is very high in sugar and red varietals can really stain fabrics–easy does it.
Next, pour the bag contents into the LBM.
Smells fantastic.
Rinse the bag out with two cups of lukewarm water and add it to the LBM as well.
Good to the last drop.
An important word on temperature: the kit has to be between 72°F and 77°F (22°C and 25°C for non-Americans). This is crucial for the success of the kit, because the yeast need to get fermenting quickly so your wine can stay on schedule. That means a bit of management: if the kit is coming in from a cold garage you’ll need a bit warmer water to make it up. If you’re in a heat wave in Florida, you’ll need to cool that water down a bit.
But it’s not terribly tricky. To hit my target temperature I ran the water in my sink for a minute until it hit 77°F and topped up the fermenter to the 1 gallon mark with that. When it was at the right level, it was time to stir.
Stir like it’s 1999.
You have to stir hard. Pouring the water into the juice makes it look like everything is well mixed, but that’s an illusion: concentrate and water have very different coefficients of viscosity and left to themselves, they’ll settle out. I gave it a darn good whipping with the shiny stainless steel spoon that came with the kit.
Next up, some measurements. First, the temperature check. I pasted on the Fermometer on the LMB and had a look.
Looking good!
With the temperature well in hand, it was time to check the specific gravity. I assembled the three piece wine thief and used it to fill the test jar.
Fill ‘er up.
With the level of the wine relatively low, it takes about three trips with the thief to fill the test jar. When it was full enough to float the hydrometer I popped it in and checked it.
Sight along the surface of the wine–that’s where the reading is accurate.
If you’ve never read a hydrometer before, there’s a trick to it: don’t look at the wine where it meets the hydrometer. Surface tension will pull it up the glass tube and give a false reading. Instead, look across the surface of the juice and draw an imaginary line from that surface across the hydrometer markings. In this case it was a solid reading at 1.090–perfect.
Next up, time to pitch the yeast. There’s a lot of information out there about rehydrating yeast and stirring it in and suchlike. For the Master Vintner wine kit, follow the instructions and just rip the package open and pour the yeast onto the surface of the juice.
As soon as the yeast goes in, the juice is considered to have become wine.Go my little yeasts! Be fruitful and multiply and make wine.
And that’s it for day one. The only thing left to do is to wait 8 days for the next step.
Well, not quite. I had three more kits to make up!
So beautiful, each in their own ways
I’ll update when it’s time to rack the wine from the LBM’s to the jugs. In the meantime they’re bubbling away merrily, making alcohol and smelling better every day. Yum!
If you’ve met me it’s not a stretch to recognise this. My philosophy has been that life should be enjoyed in big bites. As the man said, ‘moderation is for monks’. However, as I progress into my sixth decade, I’ve learned to turn the volume back down from 11 occasionally. Rather than a 48 ounce Porterhouse (I wish I was kidding when I say I ate the whole thing) I now enjoy a 12-ounce Flatiron, or some sliced flank–or even a nice vegetarian meal (I know, I know, eating vegetables is bad for the environment, but they’re so delicious!)
But when it’s time for something rich and tasty, you should never skimp: have one great Martini instead of three crappy ones. Eat a small bar of really good chocolate rather than a bunch of gritty cheap stuff. You get the drift–less is more, if it’s better.
Today I was in the mood for something really, really rich. I was in my butcher, the same hilariously squeamish chap who brings me in various animal parts while wincing (seriously, you’d think he never saw anyone have a conversation with a severed pig’s head before!). The display case held precisely two small, perfect objects.
The cow was not using them anymore
Marrow bones, a section of the leg bone of a calf. I knew right then that they must be mine. I took them home, seasoned them liberally with Sel Gris and cracked pepper and popped them in a 450 degree convection oven for 20 minutes.
Soon, my pretties!
While they roasted, filling the house with a heavenly smell, I sauteed a few brown mushrooms in good Irish butter and a wee bit of garlic and prepared a nice piece of Tuscan bread toast.
It’s the perfect food, hiding right inside your bones.
The middle of the bones is hot, rich and delicious. Dragged out with a spoon and smeared onto the toast, it was the perfect rich-but-not-overwhelming accompaniment to a glass of Pinot Noir.
I have actually attended a seminar entitled, ‘YOU are Your Brand!’ It gives me visions of
Poor cows
But as the man said, I am my own brand. If you follow me on Twitter, I am now @Wine_Guy_Tim, to save confusion from previous branding for my old company. Same old Tim with a great new name!
I spent quite a bit of time this fall talking about Super Tuscan and it got me thinking about the connection between tradition and terroir. Tradition is at the heart of European winemaking–when something has been tried and tested for fifteen or twenty centuries, it tends to stick around, sometimes without regard for absolute quality.
Terroir is supposed to be what informs tradition. The unique character of the soil, sunlight, climate, geolocation, and innumerable other factors will eventually inform grape growers which varieties will thrive and make the best wines in any location. Terroir goes off the rails when growers and producers quit asking if their wine could be better and simply stick with what was acceptable last time.
That bottle style is known as a ‘fiasco’. Tells you something . . .
Case in point is the wine I’ve been promoting for weeks: Super Tuscan. Tuscany, arguably the heart of Italian food and wine culture, produces Chianti. Over time the recipe for Chianti calcified into a formula that was eventually made into law under the DOC rules, which mandated a maximum of 70% Sangiovese and at least 10% white grapes, harking back to field blending traditions. Unfortunately, although these traditions are charming and, well, traditional, they don’t make the best wine. Well-grown, low-cropped Sangiovese Grosso grapes would make far better wine by themselves, without the addition of the other grapes. No matter, according to DOC laws: that’s the way it would be done, forever.
That’s the one, officer!
Until the Antinori’s got into the act. This Tuscan wine family deliberately set about breaking the law, delightful scoundrels that they were, and planted Cabernet Sauvignon in their vineyards. They blended it with Sangiovese (and no white grapes) and aged it in small, brand-new oak barrels rather than gigantic, characterless casks that were more typical of the general Italian winemaking techniques. The resulting wine, released in 1978 caused a sensation, on many levels. It had the hallmarks of Bordeaux–Cabernet structure, tannin and fruit, with well-developed oak and a distinct lack of Brettanomyces (an infection conferred from very old barrels, all too common in Italy at the time) and the length and dry finish of Italy, with an almost almond/cherry pit note.
On one of the other levels, the Italian wine authorities went mad. Super Tuscans could only be sold under the designation ‘Vino di Tavola’, a name reserved for wine only fit for people who lived under bridges or for wine used to put out fires. No matter: it was brilliant and delicious, and many other wineries followed suit, most notably Tenuta San Guido who made the well-regarded Sassicaia. The concept even spread to other Italian appellations, such as Piedmont and Veneto, and Super Tuscan wines sold for far more money than mere Chianti could command.
Realising the situation was beyond them, and that Super Tuscan was becoming a more credible and desirable brand than Chianti, the laws were finally changed so that by the early 90’s most of the wine could be sold under the Chianti designation, or the new IGT Toscana and DOC Bolgheri designations.
The upshot of the whole situation was that producers recognised tradition had trumped terroir, and by trying new grapes and new techniques, they could exploit the very best of their terroir to create something wholly new, and wholly better than tradition could deliver. Soon enough others copied their ideas, helping create the ‘Garagiste’ movement, a semi-sneering designation that connotes eccentric amateurs trying to craft fine wine from a humble garage.
Would you pay $2500 for this bottle of wine? Well, you’d have to.
But craft they can. Chateau Le Pin in Bordeaux’s Pomerol appellation is only 5 acres and produces a spare 600 cases per year, but the wines are astounding, crafted in the fruit-forward new world style more common from Australia or California, very lush and showy, not at all a Bordeaux-typical wine, but like Super Tuscans it sells for more than other Chateau of higher rank, sometimes clocking in as the most expensive wine in the world.
As time passes and younger, less hidebound winemakers come on scene, more of these outlaw wines are coming to market. A few years ago I encountered a completely unexpected ‘Vinos Sin Ley’ (literally ‘wine without law’!) from Spain.
If this is sin, count me in.
Utterly unexpected, it was another example of circumventing tradition to take old grapes and teach them new tricks: bold, rich and full of stunning fruit, it was nothing like the Riojas I was used to drinking, and I loved it so much I bought a case on the spot.
The latest example of lawbreaker wines is coming out of the Rhône in France. Famous for wines like Châteauneuf-du-Pape, there are 18 allowed varieties in their blends, but the stars are Grenache and Syrah. Upstart Chêne Bleu is repeating the successes of the other lawbreakers and crafting wines based on new techniques and an exegetic analysis of the potential of their terroir. I can only imagine that their wines are going to be amazing as well.
Tradition produces beautiful results. It gives us history, depth and a surety of outcome. But at some point tradition has to be examined for success, and have a light shone onto it to see what flaws time has revealed, and what new ideas and new thinking can bring. In the case of wine I’ve never felt that pitching out tradition willy-nilly benefited anyone, but likewise challenging results and exploiting the full potential of a vineyard’s terroir can only result in better wine.
I’m smiling because I’m in the middle of a factory that processes hops–reason enough for a lunatic’s grin.
It’s been a full month since I last blogged. But to my defense, I’ve been a bit busy. In addition to my partnership with Midwest Supplies and our cool new Master Vintner line of winemaking products, I’ve been busy doing a few other things. First, I shot some videos:
And then I did a little bit of travelling. Since the end of August I’ve been to:
Minneapolis
Houston
Atlanta
Victoria
Denver
Seattle
Yakima
Boston
Virginia
Philadelphia
Minneapolis (again!)
Detroit
Chicago
Kelowna
Summerland
In that time I’ve been to Hop and Brew School, done wine opportunity seminars for consumer beverage retailers, Limited Edition wine and food pairing events, shot many videos, attended the Great Canadian Beer Festival, helped plan catalogues, merchandised stores, drank beer and laughed a lot.
And now I’m typing this up in an airport lounge waiting to jet off to Winnipeg. I’ve had some exceptionally good luck with local weather on my travels, and had a lot of fun working with my friends in all of the cities I’ve visited, and I’m looking forward to the same over the next week.
I’ve got three or four blogs lined up, and soon I’ll have some very exciting news to share, but that’ll have to wait another few days: I’ve got some sales training to do, another couple of Limited Edition wine tastings and a webinar session for the members of the Canadian Craft Winemakers Association.
Off on the road again, another whirlwind adventure. I’m doing some retailer seminars (on winemaking and retailing consumer wine products, naturally) around the Eastern USA, and then a quick turnaround and I’ll be off to make some promo videos and do the first of my Limited Edition presentations for the year. It’s a lot of time on the road and my poor suffering cat is already at full-mope.
This is actually his happy look.
Ah, poor fella. I’ll bring him home a cheesesteak, I guess.
In the cool-news part of my life, I got my logo back from the designer I hired. I don’t really need a logo, and haven’t decided what I’ll be doing with it, but gosh knows I’ve got one now:
I can’t remember why I was so mad at that wine glass . . .
The big news is finally here! Midwest Supplies and Tim Vandergrift are working together! I’m really happy with the fit between us and excited to introduce new products and to work on advancing home winemaking. I became an independent consultant early in 2014. My biggest concern about my new career was where I could apply myself to make a difference in the consumer-produced beverage industry (aka Homebrewing and Winemaking).
While I connected with many small clients and really love the interaction I have with them, I looked around and realised that one of the most dynamic and exciting places in the industry was right in front of me, Midwest Supplies. I’ve worked with them for more than a decade on behalf of Winexpert and always loved how they ‘got’ the industry, understood home beer and winemakers, and generally felt they were my kind of folks. Of course, this didn’t keep me from thinking that they could probably use a guiding hand on the wine side, but I always had other priorities. Now that I’m their Technical Winemaking Advisor I feel incredibly fortunate to have the opportunity to work with them to introduce some new ideas to home winemaking and do educational and promotional activities as well. I’ve even got a couple of videos up to start, one on the benefits of using a floor corker,
And one on the savage joy of using a three-pronged stirring whip! The Great! Big! Deal! that I’m really happy about is some of the new products we’ll be bringing out in the future. No hints just yet, but I’m pretty stoked about sharing them, and won’t hide that light under a bushel. If you’re already a Midwest customer, thanks! If you’re not yet, check ‘em out, and check out My Ten Favorite Wine Kits—nine of which are on sale for a limited time! Use the secret coupon code (hint: it’s WINEGURU) at checkout and you’ll save 15%. How’s that for a hello? Lots more to come, and so much to do, and I couldn’t be happier or more proud.
After a relatively quiet summer at Chaos Manor it’s back on the road for a bit. I’m in Houston today, a city I’ve only been through once before. I’m giving a presentation on wine retailing here and I’m really looking forward to it. Not only do I get to meet Texas homebrew shop retailers (some of the friendliest folks you’ll ever meet) but also, Mexican food!
Come to Papa
If you’ve never been to Texas but you have been to Mexico, the food is different. It’s even called ‘Tex-Mex’. But it’s ridiculously good, and I’m looking forward to digging into some of it.
I’m only here for one day: tomorrow at o-dark thirty I’m off to Atlanta to catch up with some more retailers there. Just like Houston, I’m looking forward to meeting up with a great bunch of people and having a really detailed discussion of wine retailing in the USA.
My lunch strategy might have to change there, but I’ve got a plan: barbecue. Canadians are woefully ignorant of real barbecue. Shamefully, we use that word to describe grilled food, which isn’t actually anything like barbecue, which actually centers around low-heat, long time cooking over smoky wood fires.
Now that’s a pit!
Before I started travelling in the USA I had no idea that there was so much regional variation–Texas does beef best while the Carolinas do pork but have fierce regional loyalties to different sauces. Memphis does chopped pork and fabulous ribs, while Kansas City barbecues any animal that holds still too long (barbecued lamb ribs are to die for). It was all confusing and I didn’t know what to order.
But I put in action a clever strategy: any place I go that has good barbecue, I ask for help, with a little twist. If I’m in Carolina I say, ‘I’ve had Texas barbecue–is this anything like that?’. Local pride swells like thunderheads, and folks are quick to guide the poor, misguided Canadian to ‘the good stuff’. Sure it’s a wee bit of a fib, but I’ve had so much good barbecue from it that I can’t help myself.
Which reminds me of something my favorite food anthropologist, Margaret Visser put in her book, Much Depends On Dinner: people are the same everywhere: the only thing that changes is the dinner.
But it’s a long time until dinner–work first!
Edited to Add . . .
Ribs, brisket, spicy sausage, jalapeno corn muffin, heart-attack potatoes and dirty rice. Even the salad had barbecued meat in it.
Summer is here and for winemakers that means one thing: the inevitable return of our sworn enemy, Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. Minute little flying monkeys of doom, they’re hard to exclude from your winemaking areas, and while they’re easy to kill, by the time you’ve swatted one thirteen more have materialised out of thin air, looking for a free meal—females lay 400 eggs each, and they mature in as little as 7 days!
The reason why we need to be concerned over the little monsters isn’t just that they’re unsightly and chewy when you discover one inside a mouthful of Chardonnay. No, it’s their other name we need to think of, ‘Vinegar Fly’. The little blighters are filthy with acetobacteria, the organism that turns our delicious alcohol in to vinegar.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
How to combat ‘em? First, understand that they don’t eat fruit: they eat mainly yeast. When they smell carbon dioxide and alcohol, they think it’s a piece of rotting fruit where they can lay eggs and get a delicious meal. When they smell a fermenting carboy, it’s their equivalent of a Vegas buffet ten thousand miles long.
Anybody who has ever worked as a bartender over the summer months knows the sad and icky truth: you come in for the first shift of the day and any bottles that have been left with an open pour-spout (‘speed spout’) overnight will need to be poured through a coffee filter to extract the little winged corpses from their watery graves. If a fermenting carboy smells a buffet, and bottle of vodka smells like ten tons of chocolate cake.
Step one in managing these horrific little pests is exclusion. You can’t keep them out of your house and your fermenting area, so you’ll need to exclude them from the wine itself. Always do covered fermentations. The commonest fermentation vessel used to start kit wines in the US is a 7.9 gallon (30 litre) bucket with a tight fitting lid and a port to plug in an airlock. By keeping the wine sealed and airlocked, you’ll deny entry.
Second, when your wine goes to the carboy, make sure you keep that airlock topped up with water. Some folks use sulphite, and while that’s mostly harmless the sulphite usually oxidises off in a few days into plain water. Other folks want the sanitising power of alcohol and load the airlock up with Everclear or grain alcohol—this only attracts the enemy!
Third, you’ll need to wipe up every single little tiny spill of wine or juice immediately, and sulphite the area to prevent any residue from getting a yeast film going on it. Then make sure you wash your cloths or discard your paper towels in a tightly sealed receptacle—the cloth used to wipe up the juice will become a source of attraction.
Fourth, if you have to wash all racked primary fermenters or carboys (those with lees and even a small amount of cloudy wine in them) immediately. If you can’t get to the right away, pop the bung and airlock on again.
Fifth, if you filter your wine (always a good idea—I’ll talk about that in a later blog) break down and clean your filter right away, and seal the used pads in a plastic bag before discarding them: they smell just dandy to fruit flies.
Flypaper only works on fruit flies by accident. Plus, some of the stuff is toxic as all get-out, and not good for winemaking areas. You can set up a wasp trap (available from hardware stores) for them. Normally they’re filled with fruit juice or other sweet liquid, but that doesn’t impress a fruit fly. Fill it with the magic formula: apple cider vinegar with a couple of drops of liquid dish soap. The apple cider vinegar drives them to a gustatory frenzy, while the dish soap removes the surface tension of the liquid: when they fly in and hit it, they drown right away—poof!
You can also, check out natural pyrethrin-based insecticides: they’re made from plant oils, are mostly safe and can be used in food prep areas. Never use any other kind of insecticide around wine or food prep areas! Triple-check to make sure you’ve got pyrethrin and not the synthetic pyrethroid, which is much more persistent and killier. Pyrethroids are bad for the environment and can be toxic to children and pets, especially kitty-cats, who lack the enzyme to break them down, and can rapidly succumb to pyrethroid toxicity. No kitty should be collateral damage to a fruit fly!
It should be noted that cleanly made wines that have fully fermented and are sulphited to an appropriate level (follow the manufacturer’s instructions) are fairly resistan against colonisation by acetobacteria. Sulphite in particular is a good bacterial inhibitor for this organism.
But there’s always that chance: a missed sulphite addition, a little extra oxygen pick-up in fermentation, one lone fruit fly wings in and . . . well, that’s thirty bottles of wine you can’t even pour on your salad (wild acetobacter fermentations make a kind of vinegar that tastes mostly like nail-polish remover).
