The Wine-Making Continues

Decided today was the day to decant the blackcurrant wine-in-the-making from the bucket to the demi-johns. The funnel I have is quite small. I draped the clean jam muslin over the funnel to strain off any solid matter, with the result that it took a long time to pour the wine into the two demi-johns. I started the job outside, guessing it might be a messy process, and realised it was attracting wasps and flies so I brought everything indoors. I was glad I'd stood the bell jars on trays - as you can see from the photos, a fair amount of wine ended up in the trays. As I looked around at the mess, it reminded me of something that happened a number of years ago: one day I had had a couple of failures in things I'd tried to do, and was making something in the kitchen and even that went wrong. I was starting to sink into self-pity mode, thinking to myself , "I'm no good at ANYTHING", when the little voice in my head offered: "You're very good at making a mess in the kitchen!" - which was absolutely true, I'd got almost every utensil and pan I own dirty and there was a mess over every worktop. I burst out laughing and it banished the self-pity almost before I'd owned it.

One of the things that amazes me is how the jam muslin comes up nice and clean again when you boil it up with some Persil then let it go cold and rinse thoroughly.