la garagista

winter: The winter season is quiet on the farm.  The vines are happily blanketed by a foot of snow, though we are hopeful for more weather.  The more insulation the better.  The outdoor gardens are also covered by the snow, but under the pack there are still sweet carrots.  The winter garden or green house is alive with radicchio, frisee, and escarole.  The old rotating composter that we bartered for with a neighbor gave up the ghost, rust getting the better of its belly, and waits to be fixed until springtime.  In the cantina, (currently the cool corner of our diningroom), the wines have been racked a couple of times, and we barrel taste about every two weeks to keep up with how the wine is shifting and composing itself.  

We will have three red wines in the home cellar this year: Sangiovese and Barbera sourced from vineyards in California, and a local Marquette sourced from a vineyard near Lake Champlain.  California seems a long way from here, but there was a dearth of grapes here in Vermont this autumn.  Everyone wants to make wine!  But to learn how to usher grapes into wine, one needs to practice "the art of getting out of the way".  Human intervention can cause a lot of havoc in winegrowing and cellar work.  Last year's vintage didn't even make it to the vinegar pot due to the very human mistakes made.    Aside from our precious allotment of Marquette, we decided to go to market and pick slugs of California grapes to teach us the the luxury of practice.  We are currently negotiating to up our local take of Marquette and La Crescent for next year.

Because we can do less outdoor work at this time of year, we focus on what can be done indoors.  At the desk, the paperwork is almost all completed to send off to the TTB to apply officially for a license as a winery.  la garagista has been officially registered as a trade name in the state of Vermont.     We read gardening and winegrowing books, both philosophical and practical.  We meet with others trying to understand our particular terroir over glasses of wine or local beer.  We peruse gardening calendars and farmer's almanacs.  We try to familiarize ourselves with the current dialogues in landscape design and horticulture.  We study "farmer fizz", and read about vineyards and cellars in Champagne.  We think this might be easier if we owned a little vineyard in the Dordogne or the Piemonte.  But we persevere, knowing that what we grow here will have it's own story to tell in due time....

We reveal secrets.  Or at least we talk about our latest secret.  In October, we pressed our first hard cider from our small orchard that abutts the vineyard.  The caramel-colored juice quietly continues to bubble away in the other cool corner of the dining room.  We begin to steep ourselves in the world of old English and Normand-style cider-making.  We are inspired by other local cider-makers, like the clean precision of

Farnum Hill or the idiosyncratic depth of a friend's barrel-aged brew who hails from a sixth generation farm family.  We unearth an ancient style of cider from northern Italy called pomelo that ferments the apple juice on the pomace of crushed grapes.  Ideas and plans form.  While the land is covered with all this white, we watch the light and it's mercurial changes.  We become fascinated by temperatures and humidity.  Barometric pressure and planets in retrograde.   

We look at pictures.  Rows of Hidcote lavender.  Arbors draped with roses.  Vine rows healthy with grasses and bees.  Sweat beading on a fluted glass.  A field of poppies, cosmos, and echinacea.  These images propel us out to the barn where we need to start organizing the remnants of other lives and eras lived in order to clean out the place reserved for the cantina or chai.  A place with a table and a few chairs.  A place where we can invite friends to come in from the cold.  To listen to the story of the year before in a glass or on a plate....