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Here’s the quick version of my biggest winemaking triumph to date:

I brought bottle of my cidrata (limoncello made from citrons) to Darrell Corti on Saturday, because he’s been giving me advice about things to make and so I’ve been bringing him things I make to get his feedback.

He appreciated it and said he would bringing it to an orthodox easter dinner on Sunday. He also asked if I had seen Bob Sylva’s article about limoncello in the Sacramento Bee. He said I should send a sample of my limoncello to the Bee (note to self: do this!), and that he would get “Sylva” to interview me.

I mentioned during our conversation that I was making some meyer lemon wine. He asked how I was making it, and I told him. He said he’d be interested in tasting it.

He then told me about chinotto, which is a type of orange that’s pretty bitter and is only used to make some candy and a soda that people in parts of Italy like to drink before dinner.

He said that I should come back on Monday (yesterday) and he would bring in some of the fruit from his tree. In the meantime, he recommended that I get this soda. Interesting stuff.

I went home after this and bottled the lemon wine. It’s actually pretty nice.

Monday, I went to Corti Bros and tracked down Darrell. He said that he liked my limoncello better and that the cidratta separated (alcohol from the fruit, I guess). I asked if he knew why and he said no, then he repeated that the limoncello I had brought him several weeks earlier was very good.

I had brought along a split of the of the Meyer lemon wine and gave that to him. Darrell had forgotten to bring in the chinotti (he said to come back tuesday), but he looked at the bottle of wine and seemed impressed. THEN, he put it on his desk and said that he would put it in the tasting on Thursday.

Tastings at Corti Brothers are legendary. I’m sure there are thousands of winemakers who would give anything to have their wine in a Corti Brothers tasting. This is a very big deal! Even though I know that mine is just going to be curiousity at a tasting of over 100 great wines that are all competing to be carried at the store, I’m still extremely excited.

I went back today and told the person in the wine department that Darrell was going to leave something for me. He said “citrus?” and handed me a pretty big bag of chinotti…maybe 25 of them. They look like tiny dry oranges and taste bitter.

It’s pretty clear to me that I’ve been given a challenge. I brought them home and juiced and zested them and put it all in the freezer until I get back from L.A. this weekend and can think about what to make.

In the meantime, I’m not going to be able to sleep until I hear about what happens at the tasting Thursday.

My neighbor has a Meyer lemon tree. They mentioned to me last fall that they don’t know what to do with the fruits and don’t particularly like the taste of them. So, back in March, I grabbed a bunch of the lemons, did some research, and made a gallon of wine out of them. I mostly followed a mixture of the recipes on Jack Keller’s web site, with a few modifications I thought were necessary because I was using Meyer lemons rather than Eureka lemons.

Saturday morning, I went to Corti Bros and mentioned to Darrell Corti that I was making Meyer lemon wine. He said he’d be interested in tasting it. So, I went home and checked out the wine and bottled it. It’s actually pretty good.

It turns out that writing a weekly article is difficult….mostly just because I have to keep coming up with new stuff–even when everyone in the world is visiting, I have a million appointments, and I’m furiously working to get the winery insulated and fully functional before the hot weather arrives (I’ll post pictures soon!).

So, I thought I’d list the things I’ve already written about and see if any of you can suggest some topics I’ve yet to explore. I try to write articles that might make someone mad and that aren’t overly technical. I also don’t like to talk about politics. Here are some of the topics I’ve covered already:

* Religion and the Internet

* Porn and the Internet

* Gambling and the Internet

* Drinking and the Internet

* Parental Control Software (and the Internet)

* Plagiarism and the Internet

* The Semantic Web

* Single sign-on

If you have any ideas, please let me know. If your idea also turns out to be easy to write about, you’ll be my hero and I’ll write another article all about how great you are.

-Chris

Last week, a couple days after returning from our awesome vacation in Rome, I needed a topic for a column. I chose parsley…actually, I wrote about how I became an ‘expert’ on parsley. In case you’re curious about why I was talking so much about parsley, here’s the article!

My latest article is about why my friends use myspace. Read the article.

Check out my latest column on InternetEvolution.com and post lots of comments. Thanks!

Over at the Bad Astronauts Winery Blog, I just posted something about our latest release, Comet Colombard.

My article on OpenID was just posted on Internet Evolution. Read it here!

I’m writing a weekly column over there now, and I’m going to try to link to them from chrisminnick.com too when they get posted. Here’s a link to all of my previous columns for them.

Here’s my post about the fabulous Grapefruit wine over there at the Bad Astronauts Winery blog:

Grapefruit Wine!

Since I wrote that post, the initial work was done to peel the fruit, we trucked the juice to Revolution Winery in downtown Sacramento, and it’s been fermenting nicely (but slowly because of the cold) since then. The next step will happen Thursday, when we separate the fruit and the juice and continue fermenting the juice in 15 gallon kegs. I tasted it today and it still has a lot of sugar, but is definately tasting like grapefruit wine.

I think it will be very good with Asian food.

The basic idea for this came from our conversation with Darrell (see previous post). Unfortunately, his instructions focused mostly on how to prepare the citron for making marmalade, and not on how to make marmalade…so, we had to learn/guess at that part. Please let me know what we did wrong if you know something about making marmalade.

• cut 2 citrons lengthwise
• put them in cold water and bring to a boil
• throw out that water
• add cold water again and bring it to a boil
• throw out that water
• scoop the pulp and most of the white stuff out of the citrons
• julienne the citron peel
• for every pound of fruit, use 2.5 cups of sugar

At this point, Darrell just said “and make marmalade out of it”. He said this is how they make their orange marmalade (which we bought and tried…it’s very good). We’d never made marmalade before…so we found a recipe for “citrus marmalade without added pectin” on the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation and tried to use that. We mostly made educated guesses at the quantities of things to use, but this site was very helpful for learning the basics of how to sanitize and seal the jars.

Our “marmalade” is in jars now, but it doesn’t look like it’s jelled…I think we either used too much water (for the record, we had almost a pound of peel and we used 2 cups of water) or not enough of the white stuff (where most of the pectin lives). It made almost 3 half-pint jars. We’re taking off for Michigan in the morning, and bringing a jar to my mom–I’ll report back on how it tastes next week.