Stages

It’s taken me a few days to write this entry. First there was Denial – “Tim, when I was down at the winery today it smelled a lot like sparkling wine. Maybe one of the bottles leaked”. Then there was Anger, accompanied by a lot of cuss words. I tried to Bargain – well maybe not all the bottles leaked, maybe if I just do a super tightening redo job on the crown caps it’ll preserve the pressure that is remaining in the bottles, maybe it was just one bottle that was defective and blew up under the pressure. The Depression stage is just lifting as I’ve stopped busying myself with meaningless and repetitive tasks to distract myself from Accepting that almost all 45 cases of sparkling wine were lost because of a defective bottle that didn’t allow a pressure tight seal for the secondary fermentation and essential carbonation that occurs in the bottle. I did learn that the yeast build up was successful and the secondary fermentation was progressing full steam. My dad asked what I learned. “There are a lot of ways to screw up winemaking.” (Apologies to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross)