Hows my little Purple Finger?

This weekend Laura and I jumped on the opportunity to do what most Americans would skip out on in a flash. That was to wake up early on a Saturday morning and harvest crops. For fun.

As many of you know we live about 3 miles away from a vineyard which has been a blessing here in Cornville. The place is called Sleepy Creek and we have had some grand times here, and you can bet if you visit we will take you down to check it out. After some free tastings and a bit of local art you've got a nice little place to chill out at. We've seen several concerts here including Trampled by Turtles and a striped version of Blessed Union of Souls (remember them!?)

You can imagine that Laura and I get out here pretty often, we have even befriended the owners, Joe and Dawn, who are both incredibly nice and seem to never get tired of answering questions about their wine. Since we began frequenting Sleepy Creek we had heard about the Purple Finger club, which if you volunteer your time they hook you up with a discount on their wine, amongst other things. Since we are fans of their wines we decided we need to get volunteering so that we can try and get some discounted wine. After over a year of missed opportunities we managed to line up a chance to help them out.



Next time you see Laura, tell her she has nice muscles, shes flexing.

Picking grapes is not exciting business, you can learn some gossip through the grapevine but that is about it. Other than that the goal is to not trim part of your finger off. Being the giant I am, I was a bit uncomfortable (and sore) since I had to bend over every two minutes to make sure I got everything. The breaks with food and drinks made up for this though.

I enjoyed playing fetch with Daisy into the pond on our break.

After making my own wine for the past several years it was really cool to see how the concentrate juice I buy gets made, and on Saturday we learned just that. After we picked around a ton of grapes (literally 2,000 Pounds!) We watched them get crushed and de-stemmed, which I would imagine would take hours was done in only about 20 minutes, way cool.

All the grapes the crew picked.

This was supposed to be a action shot of the crush/de-stemming process, looks more like a picture of Bill though. Notice on the bottom left (or try to) the stems in that black box, looking all pristine and grape free. Amazing!

I got to stir the crushed grapes, with excellent form.

This is the press, before pressing, that greenish exorcist looking spew is actually unpressed juice, the flavor was phenomenal and it was deliciously sweet.

The one drawback I could find with the whole day was a complete lack of naked virgins stomping the grapes into mush. In fact there was no stomping at all. Someday I'm going to find and stomp grapes for wine making, mark my words.

After that we came home and we both napped. What a day!