This note was going to be a comparison between the state of my life and the inside of my refrigerator, where the green beans are piled on top of lettuce, and the asparagus was shoved in the corner behind the very sticky orange marmalade jar. It would have taken forever to get through that analysis so I’ve opted for a conversation on spring cleaning, instead.

I’m not talking about the kind of spring cleaning where you wash windows, woodwork, and draperies. This is about the kind where you get all your nitrogen tanks filled and rinse out the sixtels for the next batch of wine that goes into the kegerator.

The sixtels of Pinot Gris are all labeled and thanks to my Grandson, the red wine sixtels are now clean and ready for wine. Much like rearranging furniture to push me to clean a little deeper, I had to make a decision on what to carry in the wine bus kegerator to prepare for bottling.

Filling the sixtels is the first step of bottling a barrel, so Saturday morning the bottling crew will show up and by Saturday afternoon 2 barrels will be in bottles and ready for labels. The barrels will be rinsed and turned upside down to dry.

Initially, I had decided to no longer carry my reserve wines in the kegerator but given certain behaviors, such as taking a quick walk to the bus in the evening for a glass of wine, or the excitement of the “what’s on tap” question from friends, I’ve decided to store small amounts of my reserve wine in bulk (sixtels) onboard Ivy.

The newly named red blend will be tapped and I’m going to move the half sixtel of 2021 Barbera which currently holds the red wine space in the kegerator, to my kitchen table wine tap.

To complete this housekeeping adventure, we have to order labels for the red blend and since we have Dan with live music tonight at the happy hour, we will ask him to announce the winner and the new name for the wine. The label artwork is complete and now that we have a name, the labels will be ordered Monday AM.

Labeling of bottles is not part of spring cleaning, it is the ebb and flow of preparing wine for sales and goes on all year long. Next up in spring cleaning is to finish racking my fall wines and then cleaning the winery floor. It’s another few hours of very rewarding work and then the wines that are still in barrels will rest again for a month.

Sláinte,

Sharon