I was doing fine on my own, with small batches of grapes and the potato masher. I could even hear the juice pouring in a fine stream into the bowl from the strainer. I was pleased with my progress. I figured I have enough for maybe a bottle of wine, tops. Which is why we supplemented the grapes we picked with a commercial kit from the wine-making supply shop in town. Ben decided thirty bottles would make it worth our while and from what we have started now, we'll wind up with thirty-three.
Because Ben walked up behind me and smiled. He has such an evil smile.
How about I take over?
I'm doing fine. Look at my progress!
He frowned, all serious at once and lifted me out of the way. He washed his hands and then threw the masher into the sink and dug in, squeezing huge handfuls of green grape skins through his fingers.
And the juice began to run. Down his fingers and into the bowl in a river of sickly-sweet liquid and I started to laugh. I laughed because of course he would be a human grape-press. Why the hell not? This is a man who doesn't need a wrench to loosen a rusted bolt and sees no problem in biting live wires or swallowing lightning.
Nope. Not Ben. Ben is indestructible. Physically anyway. Well mostly. His arm is healed so he's back to his old tricks at last.
And we have one tiny container and one giant container...ah...fermenting. In two weeks we do the next step and I'm almost positive at this point that our grapes from the backyard are going to provide us with nothing less than a sordid pale green wine with a lethal alcohol by volume and I'm going to christen it Bridget's Evil Goblins wine. I think the rest is going to be Raging Monkey or something that the children and Ben came up with last year before all of the squirrels, birds, bears and neighborhood kids stole all of the grapes before we could enjoy them because the fencing around the back perimeter wasn't quite finished and there were wide open spaces where you could walk into the vineyard from the street.
We fixed all of that in July.
Now we are down to fighting just the squirrels and the surprise hornets that appeared two weeks ago and moved right in. Live and learn.
The most ironic thing is that no one in this house is a wine drinker except me and I gave it up mostly a while ago only because the older I get, the less it takes to put me on the floor. On the floor because I can't navigate in my shoes and because I laugh a lot and sway to the ground. Damn wine.
At least this time, I'll finally get to meet those goblins. I know they're out there. They just don't show themselves because Ben scares them away. If you saw what he did to the grapes today you would be scared too.
