3 batches of wine

Saturday I went over to Rod's house to help him bottle the three batches of wine he had made. Rod hadn't planned on having all three batches ready at the same time, but that is how it worked out.

Rod made blueberry, cherry, and banana wines.

Rod has an old antique glass hydrometer, and he showed me how he uses it to measure the amount of sugar in the wine.

The blueberry and banana wines were at 10% alcohol while the cherry wine was at 13%. No wonder the cherry wine tastes the best of the three!

Then we siphoned the wine from a carboy into a bucket. This was to reduce the chance of siphoning any sediment at the bottom of the carboy into the bottles.

In the following photo the wine in the bucket is the banana wine. The third photo shows a couple of wines still in their carboys along with boxes of empty wine bottles that need to be prepared for filling.



The farmer is disinfecting the wine bottles with a solution. Then Rod fills each bottle after which the farmer places the cork in each bottle.



We bottled about 30 bottles each for the blueberry and cherry wines and 28 bottles of banana wine. Pictured here are the banana and blueberry wines.



Then Rod wanted to quickly make some wine labels. He hadn't counted on my coming up with offbeat ideas for labels. Naturally I had some ideas and suggestions and hours - many hours - later we came up with three wine labels. Rod had a headache by the time we were done, though part of the reason might have been all the wine we had sampled.

The first wine label was mainly my idea, which accounts for it being the most irreverent and goof-ball of the three labels. Since this was for the banana wine I suggested the label feature a monkey. After a long search we settled on this as the monkey image.

Once we had the image the name "Hunky Monkey" popped into my head. It does look like the monkey is posing. Rod handled the text's font and coloring.

I haven't drunken enough of the banana wine yet to know, so it may be an exaggeration to add the tag line "It'll Grow Hair on Your Chest". Besides that is more of a tag line for a whiskey and not a nice wine like Rod made.


We did the cherry wine label next. I started with a connection to George Washington and the cherry tree. We couldn't find an image of this. We couldn't even find a decent image of George Washington.

We did find a few good images of cherry trees in blossom with the Washington Monument in the background, but Rod felt the connection to the wine was too much of a stretch. Beside we had noticed an artistic rendering of two cherries that was good. Rod prefers to have drawings of the fruit on his wine labels. I admit Rod's label does look classier.

I wanted to give the wine a name - more of a name that just 'Cherry Wine' - and still was stuck on Washington and that led to 'president' and 'presidential'. "Presidential Cherry Wine" doesn't sound good so we ran 'presidential' through Babelfish and most translations weren't that interesting.

Then I came up with the idea of translating 'presidential' into Japanese because of the Japanese connection to the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C. That is how we got the Japanese word on the label.

Poor Rod, he wanted a simple classy label and now he has to explain the label to everyone to whom he gives a bottle of the wine. "And why is there Japanese on the label?"


Lastly we designed the blueberry wine label. Again I went down a crazy tangent as I tried to tie 'blueberry' to Fats Domino through his song "Blueberry Hill". Rod humored me initially.

We couldn't find a really decent image of Fats Domino that would work on a wine label. We did think about using a black & white image of Fats dancing with his arms up in the air but the pixel size was too small and it was too irreverent for a classy wine.

Rod looked for images and drawing of blueberries and we decided on this image as it was more than just of blueberries and would be distinctive from the cherry label.

Now for the wine's name. With this as an image I struggled. I was still thinking about Fats Domino and Blueberry Hill and that did not work with this image. This image looks closer to a traditional wine label and evokes a location. The problem is that many wines have names related to the location of their vineyards. We didn't have a vineyard. We wanted a name that meant something to us and not merely a cute sounding name.

We struggled to choose a North Dakota name that would work with the picture. Nothing came to mind since mountains are rare to non-existent in North Dakota. I started thinking of a Montana name. I suggested "MacDonald Creek" after Glacier's Lake MacDonald as the image reminds me of where MacDonald Creek enters the lake. But Rod, never having visited Glacier Park, kept thinking of hamburgers when placing the MacDonald name on the label. We scrapped the name.

Blue. Blue. Blue. Something related to blue. Then it hit me: Cobalt Lake. My first trip with my hiking group was to Cobalt Lake in Glacier park. While there weren't any blueberries there, we did see a number of other berries: thimbleberries, elderberries, and huckleberries. Cobalt Lake it is.

Poor Rod, he makes the wines and I name them something totally unrelated to him. I chose the color of the words which explains why the color has nothing whatsoever to do with blue or purple. Rod chose the text's font and background pattern and color, which is the classier part of the label.

So "Hunky Monkey" was mainly my idea, " Cherry Wine" is Rod's idea, and "Cobalt Lake" is a combination of our ideas.

Now... to enjoy the wines!