4th of July Weekend

Very eventful but not in the usual way.

Every year my family and some close family friends make our own wine. We buy the juice of different grapes and then 'rack' the wine every 7 weeks to extract the impurities. We make all types of reds and white; (Cabernet, Valdepena, White Zinf, Chardonnay, Chianti, Burgundy, etc). We started this year's batch back in October of 2007 and this last Saturday, July the 5th, the wine was finally ready to bottle. We spent the entire day cleaning and bottling the wine; a production of about 963 bottles give or take a few.

I couldn't fit all of the cases in the pic ... but those shown are piled two high making it about 750 bottles of wine in this pic.

Anyway ... it took close to 9 hours for the nine of us involved to bottle everything. Of course, this was partly due to the fact that there were at least 30 other people in attendance to watch us work making it more of a fun gathering than actual labor. AND of course we were drinking the entire time; sampling the vino and doing shots of Pelinkovac. AND of course as with every Italian family event of mine, the food spread for the day was most impressive; hot sausage, meatballs, BBQ ribs, brochette, fried chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs, sausage patties, kielbasa and sauerkraut, sushi, grape leaves, homemade pizza bread, cakes, brownies, tons of fruit ...

I was drunk, stuffed and tired by the end of the day but I still managed to meet up with my old high school friend 'Evil Genius' for dinner before heading home.

Back in Pgh ... what to do?

Not much has happened since my return from Atlanta. Mostly because, upon my return, I caught a nasty cold and missed out on all the Halloween festivities.

I did meet up with my father and friends to start this year's batch of our homemade wine. We started the process last Saturday ... it took us roughly two hours to get the 210 gallons of different grape juice ready for 'fermenting' ... we will work with it every 7 weeks until next July when we finally bottle ... with an end production of roughly 850 bottles of wine. I'm sure I'll have more to talk about it as the process goes on.

I also finally made it out on Tuesday night to catch up with my friend Ray Lugo, front man to the internationally known afrobeat band Kokolo. It's always a trip to hang out with Ray ... talking about everything ... mainly music and touring the world.

and last night, I had dinner with 'Mr. and Mrs. Jones' to do .. what else? to keep up with them, of course. After dinner we made a quick stop at a local art gallery for the official release party of the new Pittsburgh Bike map produced by the folks over at Bike Pittsburgh. We then made an even quicker stop at the Brillobox for one more beer before calling it a night.