An Eventful Unplanned Weekend

This weekend, we didn't have anything planned, which in my mind meant relaxing and getting some things done around the house and vineyard, which we did.  On Saturday, some guests spontaneously showed up, and suddenly we had ourselves an eventful little weekend.  I haven't had a weekend here that has ceased to introduce me to something new. 

Here are some new discoveries from this weekend:

• I like having visitors. Okay, maybe this isn't a new discovery, but something I was acutely aware of this weekend. As two people who like to entertain, I love that fact that people call us to see if they can come over and hang out, which three unrelated people did on Saturday.  I might be shooting myself in the foot for saying that, so let me re-phrase:  I like it when people call us to come over and I don't have a house to clean or a big project I have to get done.  One of my favorite things about living where we do is that, for the most part, people want to come visit.  Not everyone can do what we do in their backyard. One of my concerns with moving to the country was that we wouldn't see our city and inner ring suburb friends as much.  So, my policy has always been that if friends ever want to come to us, our door is always open. 
  
• I find picking grapes very therapeutic.  It is a nice contrast to what I do on a daily basis, where I am on the phone all day, in front of the computer, checking emails, texting, etc .  It's nice to do something outside, with no distractions other than fighting the bees for the grapes I'm picking.  Plus, it is rewarding when I can literally see the fruits of my labor.  And grape harvest only comes once a year, so I might as well enjoy it!  We picked and bought some Marquette grapes from a local grower. 
  
• I like raspberry wheat beer.  After a friend called Saturday afternoon saying he wanted to stop by with his homebrewed beer for us to try, I admit I was skeptical.  We may be "wine people," but we certainly don't turn our noses up to anyone wanting to bring us beer.  Plus any beer with "berry" in the title is my kind of beer--and good beer it was!
  
• I found, yet another creative use from my leftover garden squash.  Thanks, Mom, for helping me think outside the box.  Or...rather inside the box in this case.  The window box, that is.  We pulled out all the dead flowers and came up with a lovely arrangement of....overgrown squash.  What do you think?

And perked up our little entrance wagon with some squash and pumpkins from our patch.

• Dogs get bee stings. 
  Pile of crushed grapes + swarm of bees + one curious dog pawing at pile of grapes
  X this event happening twice
  = one dog getting stung by bee two times (once on lip, once on paw)

This is Belle with her swollen lip.  Hopefully this will teach her to stay away from the grapes...they're not good for dogs anyway!

• 
  
  Four grown men are actually capable of bonding over something other than sports and beer.  Here are four men, three of whom don't know each other, spending a football Saturday crushing and pressing grapes. 
  
  
  

• My dogs are very neighborly.  It's amazing how many more neighbors I met once we got dogs.  Normally I am actually with the dogs, taking them for a walk (read: chasing them down the road) and the neighbors come out to pet the pups (read: help me catch the dogs).  But on Saturday, amidst the grape crushing and sqaush decorating, the dogs took it upon themselves to stroll on over to some neighbors around the corner and introduce themselves.  Apparently they just stood by the front door wagging their tail as if to see if maybe this house had a dog they could play with.  Thank goodness for dog tags and nice neighbors who actually call the number on the them.
  

After our guests had left on Saturday afternoon, we both took a deep breath and Aaron looked at me and said, "I have a feeling this is going to be a pretty typical Saturday for us from now on." It's busy!  But it's a good thing. "

A Little B&B

Last night was blending & bottling night.  We are taking this opportunity pre- large harvest of grapes to experiment with blending some Minnesota grown grapes with other varietals, both hybrids and vinifera.  Last year we picked some Edelweiss grapes from a local grower, which have been fermented and racked and are now ready for bottling. 

I came home to six glasses of wine sitting on the counter...a tasting Aaron had set up for us.  Who doesn't love to come home to that?

We sampled a few combinations, and eventually decided on the following blend of the three whites we are working with:

40% Edelweiss

40% Vignoles

20% Savignon Blanc

No, we didn't blend a red and a white!  Reds are next up for bottling...they just happened to be sitting next to each other in carboys for the picture.  Aren't they cute?

We bottled in our humble wine making room, aka, the utilities room.

And only had one bottle casualty...broke all over the floor.  Oops!  So we ended up with 18 bottles of our newly created blend.

By next year, we hope to move this all out to the outbuilding for a larger production.  Not that I don't love having wine spilled all over our basement floor.  Report on our chicken coop transformation coming soon! 

Next up in our winemaking excursion this week:  Grappa!

The Gentleman Farmer

I am on the phone a lot with my job, and people who know I was recently married will often ask me, "What does your husband do?"  The type of answer that they are expecting is something simple, like...I.T. Project Manager.  Which is true.  But, I don't think that answer does justice to the breadth of all that Aaron does. With all due respect to I.T. professionals, I.T. is dry and something that no one out of the realm of I.T. knows anything about.  And I think Aaron, along with most I.T. professionals would agree.  So when I respond with "IT" I can feel eyes glaze over as they utter, "Oh..."  while they picture a nerd in front of a computer analyzing data, which perhaps is what Aaron is doing during the hours of 8-5 M-F.  Although a very respectible career, I am finding people don't really care to delve too deep into what he does on a daily basis. Myself included. 

While, yes, Aaron's professional career and the one that is providing him income is in Information Technology, I always feel I need to follow-up with something about the vineyard because I feel he is better defined by where he spends his time outside of the khaki pants and button down shirts.  You see, when Aaron gets home from work, he puts on his work boots, Wrangler jeans, and tool belt and heads out to the vineyard.  If he isn't out on the tractor, he is pruning grapevines, putting up trellises, or working on some piece of equipment in the garage that he likely built himself. 

So, I'll say "he is an IT Project Manager," and then quickly blurt out, "but-he's-alsoa-grapefarmer!" Which feels funny once I say it because it sounds like I am trying to make up for the fact that he works in IT by mentioning something more enticing, when in fact I am just trying to accurately answer the question, "what does your husband do?"  Not to mention that when I say "vineyard", they don't mutter out, "oh..." and then change the subject, the way they do when I say "IT," but rather, "OH!! Tell me more about that!" 

I discussed this dilemma with Aaron one day and he informed me that I can really answer this question with just two words: Gentleman Farmer.  A term I was not familiar with growing up in the suburbs.  Apparently, a "gentleman farmer" is a farmer with an independent source of income or independent career, who also farms, either for pleasure or as an additional advocation.  I do not know how widely known this term is, but now when people ask me, "What does your husband do?" I now simply answer, "He's a gentleman farmer."  And since I promised my gentleman farmer husband that I would not post any more shirtless pictures of him, I will share with you a photo which is a perfect depiction of this title.  This photo was taken last year, before we bought a tractor of our own.  Aaron had rented a tractor from the farm supply store a few miles away and left his car in the parking lot there.  He had to return it before going off to work the next day, so off he went, in his dress pants, driving the tractor down the road.  His versatility made me giggle, so I had to take a picture.  Now THAT'S a gentleman farmer. 

Mud Prints and Vacuum Attacks

The mound of shoes by our front door might lead one to believe there are several people living in our house. But, nope. It's just the two of us. And two dogs. But they don't wear shoes. Since we traipse in and out of the house all day long going from the vineyard to the house to grab a beer, from the garden to the house to have lunch, from taking the dogs in and out on walks, we end up with our front door looking like this.

Let's face it, shoes for walking the dogs on the gravel road are different than shoes for walking in the muddy field, are different from shoes for gardening, are different than shoes for driving the tractor, at least in my book. So we leave them by the front so we always have just the right footwear readily available.

I like to think that these shoes always come off before entering the house, as this picture indicates. But they don't always. Which means trails and tracks of dirt are impossible to ignore. And as someone who likes a clean house and clean floors (and by someone I mean 'me', not the other member of my household who wouldn't flinch at mud prints on the floors for weeks), I find myself with the vacuum out almost daily. This was my attempt at cleaning our front entry rug this weekend.



Apparently, they don't care about a clean floor either. But, if we are ever invaded by vacuum cleaners, you can find a safe haven at our house.

Grapevines By the Numbers

People ask us all the time, what are we growing, what will we make, how much will we have, are we insane, etc. All valid questions. Here is a breakdown off all that we have planted over the course of 2008-2009 and what our plans are going forward. I could give you a description of each of these grapes, all released by the University of Minnesota, but their website does a much better job. http://www.grapes.umn.edu/wine.html

Marquette (Red)--1,250 vines planted
Frontenac Gris (White)--260
Prairie Star (White)--125
Sabrevois (Red)--44
Frontenac (Red)--36
LeCrescent (White)- 30
Brianna (White)--6
Misc. others-25
_____________
Almost 1800 grapevines planted





Each vine will produce about 5 bottles of wine.
The majority of these vines were planted in Spring 2009, which means...
They should be completely ready for harvest and winemaking by Fall 2011.

If all goes well...
In 2010, we plan to double our crop and...
In 2011, we should triple our current crop.

With the ULTIMATE goal down the road being...
Producing about an average of 30,000 bottles of wine or 2500 cases.

Thank you to all those who have offered (unsolicited) to be "volunteer wine tasters." If we make it to 30,000 bottles in production, we're really hoping it won't be a non-profit "volunteer" thing...but still a rewarding and blissful experience overall.

Harvest Day

Our first harvest at Schram Vineyards included 20 lbs of grapes....

And about 200 lbs of zucchini...



Today we picked grapes from the Frontenac Gris (white Minnesota variety) we planted last year. Since grapes are tpically not desirable for making wine until their third year, we just picked a few to do some experimenting with this year. Plus, Aaron was able to try out his new toy--the grape crusher. In years to follow, when we have a much bigger harvest, we'll plan to do the purple foot grape stomp, by poplular request!

I promise I will shut-up about the zucchinis for a while after this as I realize two out of my initial three posts with the subject being zucchinis is a little excessive and makes me look like a crazy zucchini lady. I guess we over planted a little this year because we tried to clean up the garden today of the leftover harvest and found all of these hidden in there. I think next year I'll do a farmers market. In the meantime, I'm running out of ideas of what to do with giant, unedible sqaush. I'm open to ideas.

The Dogs Ate The Vineyard

I should take a moment to introduce our two beloved dogs. As our only two children for now, you will likely see their names peppered throughout this blog. We adopted Tux and Belle 5 days after we returned from our honeymoon. We intended to get one dog, but after seeing this brother and sister pair romp around together and being told the story of how they were found together, starved and full of ticks, we couldn't bear the thought of separating them after they had survived traveling the road together. So, we ended up with not just one dog with the potential to grow over 100 lbs, but two. After all, what good vineyard doesn't have a vineyard dog...or two? They are Great Dane mixes, although we're not exactly sure of the mix.

They were especially puppy dog cute when they were just sweet little frail 40 lb dogs, with ribs showing, trying to acclimate to their new home while being nursed back to health. But now that they are nice and robust, they are now more like 60-70 lb dogs and cute in a way that you might describe, say, Chris Farley. They make us laugh, and all they want is to be liked and have their bellies rubbed, but their large structures coupled with their energy and curiosity make them bulls in a china shop.

The training is progressing, but naturally, we've got some work to do. I am too embarrassed to admit on here the things they have already chewed up, urinated on, or eaten, but I will tell you the first thing I discovered that was, unbeknownst to me, only foreshadowing of what was to follow.

Several weeks ago, Aaron was outside and I was sitting in the living room naively assuming that the dogs were just laying peacefully on the rug by the front door where they were when I last looked. After some time passed and it was much too quiet, I went to see what they were up to and found them in our bedroom, hovered over hundreds of tiny little torn up pieces of paper. It took me a minute to figure out which book they had torn apart by deciphering the name of the chapter on the top of one of the torn pages. I was at first relieved when I realized it was not, Twilight, which I was 3/4 of the way through at the time, but then defeated when I realized the book was, The Vineyard. It was the book that I gave Aaron on our wedding day. A hard copy autobiographical novel about a newly married couple who in the 197os started a vineyard on the North Fork of Long Island, where we happened to have honeymooned. At least I was able to recapture part of the front cover page where I had inscribed,

"June 19th, 2009, To My Husband...".

At the time I wrote it, I had imagined it being a family heirloom, held for posterity and passed down to future generations showing that ancient day the legacy of the Aaron and Ashley Schram family began, all in my handwritten script. Ah....

Little did I know that 4 weeks later, that page would be torn out of the destroyed book, ripped at two corners with teeth marks imprinted in the middle of the page and crinkled from dried up slobber. It took me a few days to be able to look at it and just shake my head and laugh. Now I think I will frame it as I think it is representative of what life and marriage is like and will be for us...unpredictable and in need of a great sense of humor.

I just hope their destruction of The Vineyard was not an omen!

Prize Zucchini

We just finished our second summer at our home and vineyard in Waconia. While one thing after another on our 12 and a half acres has been a new discovery, or new learned hobby, I thought I would start this blog off with one thing that has been defining of my breakthrough to the argicultural life: The Garden.

While Aaron grew up on a farm and has researched extensively on growing a vineyard, I think it is worth noting that my knowledge of planting and gardening prior to the summer of '08 was...about nothing. The closest I had come to gardening was watering the indoor plants as one of my chores growing up in Minnetonka. But since I moved from a 730 sq. ft. condo onto a farm with an existing 1000 sq. ft. garden alone, I decided I better embrace this gardening thing and prove that I am capable of growing something that is meant to be consumed. That first year, I let Aaron tackle the 10 acres of farmland where we started growing the vineyard, and I got my feet wet on a smaller scale.
Last year, we did a little bit of gardening ourselves, but mostly decided to wait and see what came up so we knew what we were working with. What we found were onions growing nonsensically all over the garden, an old strawberry patch in the middle with some sad looking strawberries, and what appeared to us as weeds, which we realized after seeing what we were calling "garden shrubs" grow into out-of-control vampire bushes that were impossible to kill.

Lesson learned. This past spring we tilled up the entire garden, strawberry patch and all, and started from scratch. On the garden menu this past summer: zucchini, summer squash, carrots, green beans, canteloupe, tomatoes, mixed peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, and radishes. While everything came up, there was one prize vegetable. The zucchini. They grew. And grew. And grew. I couldn't keep up with harvesting them, eating them, cooking them, and giving them away...so many stayed and kept growing. Which means that I now have about 20 giant sized zucchinis that remain there today. I was disappointed to find out this year I missed the deadline for the Carver County Fair garden submissions. My zucchini would have kicked butt over the blue ribbon winner. 2010-Bring it!

I'll wrap up with a few pictures. One of me in August 2006 at the M.A.C store in uptown trying out some new lipstick colors with girlfriends. If you had told the girl on the left in this picture, that exactly three years later she would be a growing giant zucchinis in her garden and striving for a blue ribbon at the Carver County Fair, she may have stepped on your foot with her spiked heel. Yet, here she is proud as can be.