Gray-C warming up

The weather is back to winter normal. It was 19° this morning, the coldest temperature since January 2nd (16°) but none of the rain or snow that was predicted. The grape vines are still dormant. They respond to ground temperature more than air temperature.  The canes still have pock marks from a hail storm last June. Many have died back from the sudden freezes last November. Hundreds of pine cones are dropping from our big old Ponderosa Pine trees but the pine nuts are few and far between. So the natural world is struggling to survive, renew itself and thrive again.

Inside the office, it is much the same. Every day seems to bring some new technological challenge. The new Adobe Readers make a mess of my map book files when they try to print them. But Adobe won’t let you download a good old Adobe Reader 6.0 or anything less than Adobe Reader 10. While installing files on a refurbished Windows 7 computer for Cheryl, it caught a virus and the whole system had to be scrubbed and re-installed.  After weeks of failed attempts and dodging unwanted downloads, I found an installation file for Eudora 7.1 (discontinued in 2009) so Cheryl can look at saved emails. I also found a program that could retrieve her Gmail password from her old Eudora installation. It had both an English and a Russian version. That’s got to make you nervous. but it worked.

James checking out the Rain Train

Then there was the new Hughesnet Internet connection that seemed to only work for 5 minutes at a time on two of our 3 main computers. I was close to dropping Hughesnet completely when a firmware upgrade to our wireless router solved the problem. It’s been a rough winter indoors and out.

But with exasperating technology also comes new opportunities. The most exciting is Avenza Maps. I found out that my 2012 Geographic Information System software, MapInfo, should be able to produce PDF maps that when opened on a smart phone show you where you are on the map, even when you are out of range of a cell tower (which is almost everywhere around here). But it took 3 hours of tech support for my first MapInfo support guy to call his MapInfo support guy and finally get MapInfo to produce those files. The local Tricounty Economic Development District is pushing me to make these PDF maps for all of the 140 or so trail maps now on my website plus many more maps for

The trails maps page on Map Metrics

ATV use, historical sites etc.  That would be seed money for a trails website that may eventually support itself.

A pretty cool application of this smartphone map app is to help firemen map hydrants and find addresses on smartphones and tablets. I am working with biggest fire district in the county to make that happen.

The Heritage Network is negotiating with Stevens County to manage the Crossroads on the Columbia Digital Archive that we built with help from many volunteers from 2011 through 2013. Even though nothing has changed on it for well over a year, use has grown from 11,000 hits per year to over 24,000. The goal is to make that site also pay for itself.  But first we have to get official control from county government, which is proving to be a nightmare.  At least they would be paying $200/year to keep the website on line if we get a contract signed.

Cheryl Serves Wine

Another project funded through Map Metrics is an interactive historical map of around 150 places in nearby Pend Oreille County.  When complete, you will be able to click on an icon in a Google Map and see pictures and stories about that place.  A smartphone map tour of those same places is a natural offshoot project.

The new tasting room sign

Meanwhile, back at the winery, the tasting room is improving with barstools and pictures from Sicily, including a panorama taken from the Castelbuono castle that Giuseppe Cicero gave us as we left there in 2010. We had sold down our inventory of bottled wine to less than a case each of several varieties.  But over the last few weeks enough wine has stopped working that we were able bottle many more cases from years 2012 and 2013.  Even more is ready to bottle, but right now there is not enough time.

Speaking of young growing things, my daughter April visited with our grandson, James Houston, on the last day of the month.  James had a great time playing ball with the dog and running around.  We checked out the vineyard and later went out for music and pizza at a benefit for the local food

The Foodstock Poster

bank called “Foodstock”.

The annual Panorama Gem and Mineral Club rock show is coming up this weekend.  Two weeks after that I will be selling and talking about grape plants at the Colville Home and Garden Show.  A garden club has already visited the winery and vineyard and other people have come to look over the available plants, so Spring is just around the corner, even if not quite here yet.  Ready, set, grow!

Our first few months of operation have been very successful.  So much so that we are suspending our tasting room’s weekly open hours on Saturdays.  Until more wine stops working and gets bottled, we need to slow down.  There is still wine available but please call 509-738-6155 if you would like to schedule a tasting.

Apples selected for the cellar.

November is an odd month to be writing a blog. It is hard-pressed by December for any airtime. Even before Thanksgiving, the Christmas media barrage was in full swing. As if that was not enough, Christmas weather started early and is still going. Last year it was the “Polar Vortex”, this year the news called this cold snap the “Polar Plunge”. I’m calling it the “Polar Roller Coast to Coast-er”. It started off slow, the first day we had a warming fire going all day was November 4th. The next day was cold but nice enough to cut up half a goat (that we got from Quillisascut Farm School) outside on a table under the big pine tree. The next week was the big plunge staying below 20 degrees and down to 17. At least we didn’t get 7 feet of snow like Buffalo, New York.

Cheryl tickles her ribs

While we were still bringing in food from the garden and orchard, I started transforming this office building into a Tasting Room for Barreca Vineyards. The first step was to clear out an area on the west wall that had not been purged in years. Next I had to move all the carboys of wine in the building out of harm’s way. Then the real chore began: dismantling the loft which had held a bed for guests the last 17 years. All of the lumber from the loft was used to

The working wine

make a bench for 43 carboys of working wine, some working since 2012.

The apple trees didn’t have a chance to fully ripen or even get a water core when the Polar Roller Coaster coasted in. Luckily I had picked 600 lbs off our big tree and the neighbor’s trees before the big freeze hit. The trees still have their leaves stuck on the branches but the apples stayed above freezing in our storage shed. Unluckily, I had missed the big neighborhood apple pressing when we went to Barreca Family Thanksween in October. I didn’t look forward to crushing all of those apples by hand. I did look forward to putting some apple cider in the freezer and turning the rest of the juice into apple wine. A neighbor, Joel Green, came to the rescue by loaning us an apple press that had been converted to use an electric motor. It took me a week pressing apples off and on to get through them all.

Daring Doe checks out the cider press

The left over apple pulp was very popular with the local deer. Too popular really. I did manage to take most of it to a local sheep ranch where sheep and horses munched it down. The deer did get their fair share. One day I had 4 of them lined up for nibbles while I was crushing.

While the pulp might motivate the deer, figuring out new wines and ways to make them using apples motivates me. A lot of wild and domestic fruit and berries go to waste here that would make tasty wine if they were only sweet and juicy like grapes. For several years I have been cooking down apple juice on our wood heat stove to bring it’s sugar up to the same sweetness as wine grapes. This Caramel Apple wine has been popular with many people, but is hard to do at any scale, even though there are a lot of apples going to waste. One day last month while defrosting a jug of cider from the freezer, I noticed that the juice that remained liquid was much sweeter than when first pressed. The water molecules freeze to each other in thin sheets and leave the sugar and some juice unfrozen. With some experimenting, I have learned ways to use the very cold nights that came back with a vengeance at the end of the month to freeze-sweeten the apple juice. But with no fruits or berries to combine with the sweet apple juice I’ll have to put this line of exploration on ice until next year.

Cheryl and I went to Spokane on the 21st to celebrate her 65th birthday. We did a lot of shopping and ate out at Milfords Fish House. (I think we’ll stick to Anthony’s for seafood from now on.) We headed home in pouring rain and drove in it for the next 80 miles. The big birthday surprise was when we got to Kettle Falls and down to our place, the rain had turned to snow as the Polar Roller took another dive down home.

The Tasting Room

The next day I started a shop project to strengthen the tasting “bar” that is now the centerpiece of the office. First I had to clean out the shop. (Does this sound familiar?) That included replacing the decade-old vinyl window with one that is “so clean it seems to disappear”. Now I can heat the shop without competing against the wind.

The shop

Daughter April and grandson James visited on the 28th. We hiked up the hill and found a Christmas tree to take home. So in the end, Christmas and all the doings of December took control again. That means among other things, that I’ll need to condense all of these blogs into a Christmas Newsletter. The snow

Bringing in the tree

is back but rain is predicted. The Polar Roller climbs to the top for another run… Cheryl says: “Hopefully we’ll have a real white Christmas that brightens the scenery considerably and lightens the mood as well.”

So, three months without a blog… I have not really gone into hiding even if it seems like that. Just as August got under way, I was installing a dead bolt on the 6 inch thick cellar door and sprung something loose in my back. My trusty chiropractor got it working again after a couple tries but it is still not exactly right. That kindof set the tone for the last 3 months: lots to do and no time for extras. Of course there were lots of extras. Sure I needed to finish the last third of the trails contract I landed three years ago and had been putting off all year. I was cranking out trail maps and driving into the mountains to take pictures. I still have a lot of work to do to make the office/tasting room presentable even though it has technically opened at the end of July. I got the

John and Joe Barreca with bird netting over the vineyard

bird nets up just as the birds noticed that the red grapes were turning blue. I kept looking for huckleberries while visiting trails. Forest fires were smoking up the air almost every day…

And then the visitors started coming. April and her family are now close by

Tony, April and James on the side of their 100+ year old cabin

and have been over several times. Bina did a marathon road trip from California with her two small kids in her 1980 Mercedes. Her husband Joe Brock describes it as “a 1980 with the non-turbo, naturally aspirated 2.4 liter diesel. I think it is one of the best cars ever made. It comes from a very special time in the history of Mercedes, when they were somehow letting the engineers make all of the decisions about how to build cars, rather than the accountants. The car is literally designed to last as long as possible and to be a pleasure to wrench on the whole time. The original owner was a well-known professor at UC

Bina with The 1980 Mercedes

Berkeley named Nello Pace. I bought the car from a guy that got it from his widow. Nello picked the car up new at the factory in Stuttgart, and then had it shipped over to California. There is a meticulous maintenance record for the car over its entire life, and the mechanic was Nello’s next door neighbor, Nick.” It was a very impressive car. It looked to me like it should have small flags over each fender and a police escort. Bina drove up the San Poil River Valley at night just as the Devil’s Elbow Fire broke out and somehow managed to slip through before the road was closed. The daytime temperatures were over 100 degrees. Bina and her kids spent a lot

Bina, Nala and Ovid picking huckleberries

of time at nearby Bradbury Beach. Many old friends visited them there. Luckily I finally did find a great huckleberry patch and we`went up there to pick with Bina and the grand-kids, Ovid and Nala.  A photo album of visitors.

Meanwhile, warblers, a protected yellow and gray songbird, were managing to get stuck in our older bird netting. I tried to get to them in time and deport them elsewhere in a re-purposed cat carrier. But many died before I got to them or after our cat did. I felt a heavy weight for losing the dead ones and intend to replace that kind of netting by next year.

I also bought an old platform scale with a sliding weight. I thought I could easily find additional weights for it but that didn’t work out. It is a very precise scale with increments of 100th of a pound on the sliding part. Probably not the best choice for measuring the grape harvest… So I spent some time making my own set of weights by melting

The new (old) platform scale

down lead bullet tips that I had collected years ago. I like the platform scale because it doesn’t just push back against a weight, it finds a balance between the load and the measure. Maybe it’s just a Libra thing. My birthday is near the equinox, the evenly balanced time of year. I do notice however that it is the fastest changing time of year. By the time I am writing this, it is much darker and colder, no 100 degree days now, although remarkably we have not had a hard frost yet. Tonight daylight savings time reverts back to something close to real solar time. So a balance is hard to hold on to.   Harvest Photo Album.

By the end of August, we had finally visited our daughter April’s new house at the end of a 7 mile gravel road that comes out right on the highway right across from the Curlew school where she is the science teacher. Three days later, my brother John and our 92-year-old father arrived for a visit. Dad had not been here in many years and we had some adventures. We toured my vineyard and another new vineyard down the road. The owner let Dad drive an ATV since he has trouble walking long distances. We took him over to see April’s new home and visit their landlord, who is an old friend of mine. We toured her school. My sister Rosalie

Dad and April in her science classroom

came to pick Dad up and we ate dinner at our favorite restaurant cashing in on some credit I had for planting grapes there. Things settled back down after they left for Seattle and I picked up the burdens of trying to get my trail maps done and also get the crops in.

I also got to ride an ATV for the first time myself a few days later with a rockhound friend out a rugged trail to the Talisman Mine. The mine tunnels into some very solid rock on a cliff that drops off 2000 feet to the valley floor below. The view is spectacular over the border into a lake in Canada. A tram once carried ore down the cliff face to a mill next to the railroad line. The ATVs made it possible to be home to cook dinner and get back to drying fruit and making maps. Our new Cabela’s Food Dehydrator can handle more fruit than I can. By the end of the season, we had 13 gallons of nectarines, plums, apples, pears, raisins and apricots. Tomatoes are still drying.

Christina Lake as seen from the Talisman Mine.

Business was good this year. We prepared for winter by buying firewood and a new kitchen range. The range made a nice 19th wedding anniversary present for both of us and as designated pie maker I cooked a pear pie in it for my 67th birthday, three days later. The day after that we started picking this year’s harvest of grapes. It turned out to be the biggest and best yet. Luckily just before that, I got the trail mapping project online and was able to devote most of October to making wine. So the wieght of one project was off and another was on. My new scale got a lot of action in October. What didn’t get much action was being paid for the trail work by the government – a shift from weight to wait.

In a related lucky break, we were able to buy an 80 gallon stainless steel vat that had been used to process honey by a friend of ours. So crushing and fermenting hundreds of pounds of grapes at a time became a regular routine. It took a lot of help from our friends. I felt almost like Tom Sawyer convincing Huck Finn that whitewashing a fence is fun. Actually picking grapes with a friend is fun. And crushing them all in a short time at the end of the day is satisfying. Cleaning up after dark does tend to make for a long day though. We picked nearly a ton of grapes but we will have to wait 2 to 3 years to taste the wine.

Joe Barreca and Carl Bach in my first selfie after Harvesting Lucie Kuhlmann

With the wine in carboys bubbling away on my office floor, cases of wine for my family, appetizers for dinner, songbooks and an electric bass packed in the Rav4, we headed out to Friday Harbor for the annual Barreca Thanksween (explanation to follow) with a lot to be thankful for. We left at 5:45 AM and got to the 2:40 ferry with only 10 minutes to spare. This event is now so big that the family rented the Grange Hall to fit everyone in. I picked mushrooms on a walk arranged by my sister Rosalie and we bought some more Chanterelles.  Thanksween photos

The snow on the North Cascades Highway on the way back.

at a roadside stand on the way back. Snow had begun falling on Washington Pass (the reason that our family Thanksgiving has been moved up as a concession to those of us on the east side of the mountains to before Halloween – to make travel safer) and we could hardly wait get back home.  Fall Travel Photos