Monday, August 30 2010

On the Death of Hobbes

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee.

--Robert Service, The Cremation of Sam McGee

It's wonderful to quote a little bit of that poem. It was my Grandmother's favorite, and if properly wheedled she would quote it from memory to us pesky little grandchildren. She's passed, lo these years gone by, but the poem remains a favorite connection to her. If you have never read it, stop wasting time on my blog, click the link above and read it, out loud, wherever you are. If you want to annoy your Granny, try chanting it to the tune of 'Gilligan's Island'. If you have read it then you'll know that the climax of the poem is when poor, chilly Sam McGee meets his final reward inside a funeral pyre.

So what's the connection? Faithful readers will recall that I finally retired good old Hobbes, one of the first wine barrels I ever owned. Barrels don't last forever, and Hobbes and I had each held a lot of wine, him first and then me. A friend like that you can't let go quietly into the night. I felt it only honourable to send him off with a proper Viking funeral, rather than the ignominy of becoming a planter or a display piece in a retail store. I would cremate him.

Hobbes was from Missouri, not Norway, but you get the idea

First things first: I needed to get him into shape to burn properly. I emptied out the last batch of wine he contained, cleaned him with some soda ash and hot water and then stored him bung-down in a cool, low humidity environment, to get him partially dried for handling.

You're hooped, pal

The first step was to get all of the hoops off of the outside of the barrel. They're held on with a little nail/clip device that keeps them from sliding down. In the picture above, if you look on the left side of the hoops you'll see them in place. A quick twist with a pair of pliers and out they come. Next step is to loosen the first set of hoops. Even with the clips removed they're still wedged in tight.

I hate to pry . . .

After all the hoops come off the barrel it's ready to come apart.

Strangely naked-looking. Note the crack on the left side.

A quick tap with the handle of the screwdriver and

We all fall down

I had thought that after ten solid years of being full of wine that the staves would be completely saturated, but that was far from the case.

Less than 2 millimetres of penetration by wine

The inside of the barrel smelled absolutely terrific: winey, oaky, and toasty with plenty of vanilla. One thing about Hobbes had always worried me. I got him at a slight discount because one of the staves had a visible crack half-way across it. It had obviously happened while the stave was being heated and bent into shape, but I'd initially worried that it might leak. That turned out to be a baseless concern:

I canna hold it Captain, she's breaking up!

Even though the crack goes half-way through, the stave held wine and never leaked. Good old Hobbes.I took the opportunity to have a look at the heads (ends of the barrel) as well. Although the wood there is much thinner, it had held up as well, with a small accumulation of tartrate crystals.

The groove just below the crystals fits into a notch in the staves to form a tight seal.

These crystals are actually precipitated potassium bitrartrate, formed when tartaric acid from the grape juice combines with a nitrogen source (minerals from the soil the grapes were grown in, or from nutrients added to the fermentation for yeast health) and grow into what look like little sugar crystals. The industry calls them 'wine diamonds' but most people know them by their common baking name, 'Cream of Tartar'. Cool eh?

My next step was to gather up all the bits and stack them to finish drying.

To the woodshed with you

I got busy and didn't get to my burning ambition until the middle of August. But it was worth the wait. I grabbed some gear and headed down to a secluded spot on East Beach. Technically it would be illegal to hold an open campfire there because it's more than 500 feet from a fire hydrant, but I'm pretty sure that it's not possible to burn down a shingle beach with no trees and no brush for hundreds of yards in every direction and an ocean ten steps away. Step one was to stack up the staves and light 'em up.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

It took only about 20 minutes to get a really intense fire going the heat was tremendous inside the little cairn of rocks. My remote infrared thermometer read 775 degrees!

Hot hot hot!

After it died down I put a variety of things in the griller: marinated pork tenderloin, a dry-rubbed chicken breast, a big juicy steak and a bunch of onions, zucchini, peppers and whatnot.

Hard to get the colour in this pic, but the coals are perfect ruddy orange and hot as heck.

The heat was a little tricky, so I wound up getting some extremely well-browned chunks of vegetables, but the meat was delightful: smoky, a little sweetened from the wood and beautifully charbroiled.

Beach beef

A fine dinner was had by all, except that it being a public place we couldn't have any wine with the meal. BC has some funny laws about drinking in public. Basically they say, 'don't', and they're not really kidding, so it was icewater until we got home. But for all that, it was a delicious interlude and a novel way to take my old faithful companion to a new place where he could serve me once again.

And therein lies some fun: I only used half of the staves from Hobbes carcass. If anyone wants the rest of them, minus one of the heads (I'm mounting it in my wine room) send an email telling me what you'll cook up with it (and promise to send a picture of your meal) to tim(at)winexpert(dot)com and I'll choose the best request and ship it to your door. You too could have a super hardwood wine oaked beach grill.

Posted by The Tim Reaper AT 10:10AM

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