Rainy days

A month ago, I would have told you that I would do anything for some rain. Our orchard was looking so dry and brown. The trees were alive, but a bit scraggedy. We were going through jerry can after jerry can of fuel to run the generator, to pump water on the trees (and it's my job to fill the jerry cans and I absolutely hate it). It was getting pretty miserable.

Fastforward to now and I'm getting a bit sick of all the rain.

About a week ago, there was a pretty big rain fall. Our farm only got around 80mm - so enough to give everything a good drink and to top up the tank a little. Bundaberg got around 300mm and roads were flooded and farm crops wiped out.

Since then, it's been off and on rain. Today is day two of virtually non-stop rain. More than a drizzle, less than heavy. Just constant wet.

We've been stuck inside and we're starting to go a little stir-crazy. Every time we dash outside we drag red muddy footprints behind us. It's the coldest we've been for a long time (20 degree maximums - the horror!). The donga is starting to smell a little funky from no airflow (we can't have any windows open otherwise everything gets soaked). The brief patches of sunshine encourage the weeds to grow that little bit taller.

So, I know I'm not allowed to complain about the rain. Rain is good and we love rain. But I'm starting to get just a teensy bit over it.

I'm back!

I can't believe I've been so slack in updating my blog! I'm sorry! If any sort of excuse will help, we've had a hectic few months...!

Here's what's happened since August last year.

Winery Life Stuff

We opened a pop-up shop in Hervey Bay (about 45 minutes south of Childers, but on the coast). The plan was to see how it goes over the Christmas period and either (ideally) keep the shop and have it turn over enough $$ to employ a staff member to run it...or close it. After a few months it became pretty clear that the latter option was the way to go! It was a good experiment, and something we always wanted to try...but not a particularly successful experiment! The good news was we ended up breaking even on the whole adventure.

We went to Hong Kong! Back in May this year, we attended HOFEX, Asia's largest food and hospitality trade show with Trade and Investment Queensland. We shared a booth with 12 other Queensland food businesses to showcase not only our products, but what investment opportunities are available in QLD. It was a pretty chaotic week - something completely overwhelming compared to anything we've ever been to before (think four full on days, packed with meetings, dinners, functions, tours and talking to more people than you ever have before!). It was a really cool experience though, and what we learned was invaluable. Watch this space!

We now make apple cider! After buying (and breaking) an apple crusher (that we foolishly tried to use to crush pineapples), we had a crack at cider making. Rather than our usual small batch trials we jumped right in and bought 4 tonnes of apples - and ended up producing just over 3000L of apple cider. It turned out bloody delicious, we developed an awesome label - and Cheeky Tiki apple cider was born! We have around 30 stockists in the Bundaberg/Hervey Bay areas, and are about to announce our Brisbane based stockists next week. It's been a little confronting having to put my 'salesman' hat on, and I still find it so terrifying trying to do the sales pitch on all these different venues - but I know we have an awesome product and the only way we will be able to move forward is to start pushing it and getting our brand out there.

Since our first initial batch of cider, we have bought in another 4 tonnes of apples for a second batch of 3800L...and we've decided to do one more 4 tonne batch before the end of apple season, just to ensure we have the stock to last us until the start of the 2018 apple season. Unlike other ciders (not to name names - but the most popular ones you see around the place) our cider is actually made with actual real apples that we crush ourselves...compared to buying in bulk foreign apple concentrate, watering it down and adding 'apple aroma compounds' and other nasties. This makes it a lot more labour intensive...but produces a delicious cider with a unique selling point.

We survived another avocado season! Over the first weekend/week of March we harvested our Shepard avocados. It went as well as could be expected - no rain, hard work, cuts and scrapes etc. We ended up with an extra bin of fruit this year (yay!), and the fruit quality was better this year (yay!) but the overall fruit size was smaller than last year (boo!). So, we made pretty similar money to last years harvest. The trees are already loaded with flowers for the 2018 harvest, but there is a looooooong way to go until March. Don't count your avo's before you've picked them! (Side note: if anyone is wanting to visit us - the first weekend in March would be awesome!)

Personal Life Stuff

We've had a cracking run of visitors in 2018, with my side of the family finally starting to pull their weight! I had a completely random surprise visit from my brother for a few days. I still can't believe everyone managed to keep that a secret from me!

Then my cousin was in town for work, so he came by for a visit too! It was so good to be able to show my family around the place, and to show them that #winerylife is actually pretty awesome. (He also tried to pop by for a surprise another time...but we weren't home! Whoops!)

Finally, I also had my beautiful friend Becca visit...all the way from America! She was on a whirlwind tour around the globe and made a special effort to come all the way to Childers for a visit. Becca and I met at summer camp back in 2009, when I was her favourite councillor and we used to pig out on chocolate together. Fast forward eight years (well, technically seven - we were at summer camp in 2010 together too) it was like nothing had changed and we were back in Maine, pigging out on chocolate. She ended up being a fantastic winery apprentice, and loved her few days of sugar stirring and pineapple chopping. (Sorry again, Becca! Love you!)

Over on Josh's side, we went to Bali the week before Christmas with his dad, stepmum, bestie and bests girlfriend for a week. I had a ball - massages and swimming in the pool all day, nasi goreng and cheap dresses. Josh had a ball for the first few days - bintang's by the pool and mini golf...then he copped a horrendous dose of food poisoning and was out for the best part of two weeks. I'm not sure we'll ever end up in Bali again.

We've also had a visit from his mate Maherrrrrbo. It's always a good time when Greg visits - in fact, when anyone visits - it breaks up the monotony of living, working, breathing the winery all day, everyday. But Greg especially, he's hilarious and loves a sneaky bakery jam doughnut treaty, just like me.



I think that's the highlights from the last six months! It's been a good few months - a few ups and downs, but ultimately I feel like we've turned a bit of a corner and all of our hard work is starting to slowly pay off. It's not going to be smooth sailing for here on out, I'm sure...but I feel like we're on the right track!

A Clean Slate

Sometimes you decide that it's time to stop, regroup, and start with a clean slate. Sometimes, the universe decides that for you.

The universe decided it was time for us.

It's been a funny old week - aside from being extraordinarily busy setting up our new shop in Hervey Bay (yep - we've now got two shop fronts to buy our booze from!), we've also had quite a few large group bookings (a day preparing food, the day that they are here, then a few hours cleaning up).

On top of this, our rainwater tank got a little out of whack and started smelling really gross. All of our water had the stench of sewerage/pond water for about a week before we couldn't stand it any longer and made some calls. After the advice of 'chuck in some chlorine', 'buy a filter cartridge system' and 'don't worry, its probably fine', we decided to bite the bullet and pay "The Tank Cleaners" to come out and, well, clean our tank.

I am SO glad we did!

We had to drain out the whole tank (devastating), but then Peter the Tank Cleaner wiggled his way inside and for the next half hour all we saw was handfuls of leaves and gunk getting flung out of the top. When he was done, he explained that he evicted a family of frogs and there was about 8 inches of 'decaying organic matter' sludging up the bottom. That, along with the stinking hot days we've had lately, caused some serious algae and bacteria growth. It was so bad that a proper cleanup was the only solution.

After a stern talking to about proper rainwater tank management, we jumped up on the roof to give all the pipes and gutters a clean out with the high pressure cleaner and then we were ready for a fresh start.

We've had the tanks topped up with water again, and hopefully it won't be too long until we get some rain to finish off the job.

Aside from that, the new cool room that has just been built is still a tad leaky, so again we've made the big decision to accept our losses and build a big roof across the whole thing. So Josh has been up and down a ladder all day doing that. It looks surprisingly neat and tidy, and doesn't really fit in to the mish-mash of everything else on the farm!! Fingers crossed it solves our leak problem...I guess we will found out soon enough.

Finally (everything comes in threes, you know), even Betsy had a clean slate this morning. She's been getting progressively rattlier over the past few weeks, and a mechanic friend of our said she needed a new rear muffler. Eventually I got around to ordering her one...just in the knick of time! Her old one had rusted off and was hanging by a rubber thread. 20 minutes later Josh had fitted the new one, and I was off on a test drive. I can't believe the difference a new muffler makes! She's back to being fuel efficient, zippy and has lost that dirty fake-V8 growl she has had lately!

So - all in all - it's been a very expensive but productive day. Not a single customer, but never mind. There is always tomorrow!

The house that Jack built

But instead of a house, it's a cool room. And instead of Jack, it's Josh and Geoff.

Today, the boys built their second cool room together. We bought a heap of refrigerated cold room panels off Gumtree (as you do) and had them trucked up to us from the Gold Coast to Childers. They sat around for a few weeks while we waited for a concrete slab to be poured earlier this week, and then the boys put it all together today.

I'm quite impressed, I must admit. There was a lot less swearing this time around than last time, and they've done a great job. We ran out of glue (again!) so it's not quite done - but they will finish off the door in the next day or two.

The whole point of building a new cool room is to be able to increase our production of wines as we head into our second season of producing fruit wines. They've been immensely popular, so much so that we've sold out of the 'first round' of everything we've made and are well and truly onto 'round two' (and three, and four) of a lot of our wines. It's great that we have been selling them so well, but it's also really time consuming to keep producing our wines in such small quantities (a hundred or so bottles at a time).

By having more space to ferment and age the wines means we will be able to produce more at once, hopefully meaning we will be able to cut some costs by filtering and bottling all at once...and simply have more stock on hand.

As summer creeps closer (and the humidity increases!) a lot of the lovely summer fruits are also ripening up, ready to be turned into wine. We are eagerly awaiting our 2017 crops of mangoes, lychees, dragonfruit and plums and can't wait to get these back on our shelves.

Slab getting poured

All ready for graffiti! (and to dry)

Walls going up

OHS nightmare - roof going on

Oh hey up there. 

Winners are grinners

I'm absolutely stoked to announce that we won SEVEN medals at the Perth Royal Show fruit wine competition!!!!

We entered seven wines, and to pick up an award for every single thing we entered is absolutely insane. We were nervously hoping for perhaps one or two, but to get seven is incredible.

We collected:

Silver - Dragonfruit Wine (Sweet)
Silver - Jaboticaba Fortified
Bronze - Dragonfruit Wine (Dry)
Bronze - Pineapple Wine
Bronze - Starfruit Wine
Bronze - Plum Wine
Bronze - Limoncello Liqueur

To get a bronze, we needed to score 15.5 - 16.9 out of 20, a silver was 17 - 18.5, and a gold was 18.5 or higher. So, it was possible for multiple wines to be awarded a particular medal in each class (rather than in the olympics when there is just one gold, one silver and one bronze).

We are just so thrilled to know that we are on the right track and what we are producing is actually pretty good. It's been a huge motivation for us to keep pushing on, trying to improve with every batch and to go for gold in 2017.

To get the wines in on time, however, was a little more difficult than we were anticipating. We sent off our entries (two bottles of each) in two big boxes via a courier to family in Perth. The Royal Show Society is very strict with entries - if they aren't delivered between the particular hours on the nominated day, you simply miss out.

The day before the wine was due, it still hadn't arrived in Perth, and every person I spoke to at the courier company couldn't tell me where it was.

Eventually, at around midday on the due date I heard that the pallet with our boxes was at the depot in Kewdale. There was four hours to get it from Kewdale to the showgrounds otherwise it was all just a big, expensive waste of time. Luckily, Josh's dad was out and about and was able to collect it from the depot directly - after an infuriating hour watching the warehouse guys check each box (and each box again) they eventually found ours and Cooper was able to deliver them for us.

It was such a stressful 48 hours leading up to the delivery, that the next month waiting for the results to be released wasn't quite as bad. We checked the Royal Show website every day hoping that it had been updated. The day that it was, we were both so nervous to actually open the link and check the results!

Anyway - we are just so thrilled that despite all the chaos leading up to it (and despite not having ever made a fruit wine up until the start of the year!) we are just so chuffed to have a few awards and can't wait to proudly display our certificates on the cellar walls!

A day in the life

After losing a little blog inspiration, a friend said "why don't you write about a typical day at the winery". I complained that there is no such thing as a typical day because every day is so different!

With that in mind, I randomly picked yesterday to take some photos to have something to write about. And here it is...

Thursday 30th June, 2016

We woke up at around 7am at Josh's mums house in Hervey Bay, with an impatient dog begging to be let in the bedroom. With oodles of good morning kisses, we snuggled Otto for a few minutes, before getting up and dressed. We'd been out to our favourite Indian restaurant the night before as an early birthday dinner for Josh, and then stayed the night at Von's. We do this fairly regularly, perhaps once or twice a month, whenever we want to get out of Childers for the night.

After we said our goodbyes, and gave one last snuggle, we headed to our favourite cafe in the Bay (Eat @ Dan and Steph's - the winners of My Kitchen Rules a few years back) to grab a takeaway cold brew coffee and a bacon and egg toastie for the road. Josh scoffed his quite easily, and I was left driving one-handed, while licking up dribbles of aoili and bbq sauce from the other.

About 40 minutes later (10 minutes south of Childers), we called into a roadside fruit stall/packing shed for 10kg of Lemons (for Limoncello) and 10kg of Mandarins (for marmalade). $15 poorer and 20kg more citrusy, we were nearly home.

We unpacked the car and put the fruit in the cold room to be forgotten about for a few days.

After changing into some work clothes, Josh reversed the forklift out of the driveway and loaded up a few buckets and a pallet, then drove down to the orchard. We had a star fruit tree loaded with fruit and decided that today was the day to make star fruit wine. (Literally just decided to do it today, it had been on the radar for a few weeks, but finally committed yesterday morning). We spent about an hour or so picking 150kg of fruit, then took it all back to the winemaking cellar. By this stage, it was about lunchtime.

Not exactly OHS approved, but here I am on a pallet, hoisted up into the Starfruit tree. It's much easier than using a ladder. 

Josh also had the irrigation all cranked up again, after two weeks of no water (they were doing maintenance on the pipes or something). So, we also had to do a quick walk through all the rows to fix any blocked sprinkler heads. It's a shitty job at the best of times, but not ideal getting soaked on a cool winters morning.

Hitching a lift on the forklift, back to the cellar

About a quarter of our 150kg starfruit. (Plus two Chocolate Pudding Fruit that I picked to see if they will ripen yet!)

Back in the shed, we organised all the equipment we'd need for the day and gave everything a quick clean and sanitise. While that was getting sorted, Josh also quickly mixed up a batch of our amazingly delicious cold drip coffee liqueur. (It's been selling out like hot cakes!).

Going all Walter White in my gas mask while mixing up the sanitising chemicals. It stinks. So bad. Even with the mask. 

Josh - getting sick of all the photos and mixing up some coffee liqueur. 

Bucket by bucket, we crushed the starfruit and then pressed the pulp to give us as much pure starfruit juice as possible. This liquid was put into a fermentation tank to settle overnight and we started the worst part of the job - the clean up. It always feels like the "good" part of winemaking takes about 10 minutes and the epic clean up and sanitise afterwards takes hours. We were done at about 2:30pm.

Starfruit into the crusher!

About 100 litres of crushed pulpy goodness!

Our beautiful bladder press! Under the bag is a metal cage and inside, a water bladder. Water (from the garden hose) pumps into the bladder causing it to swell up, smooshing the fruit between the bladder and the cage forcing just the juice through the holes in the cage (that then hit the bag and dribble in the red bit and into the bucket). 

I nipped down the the shops to grab some chicken from Jamie the Butcher, and some veggies from the supermarket. I tried to buy Josh a pair of thongs for his birthday, but the only shoe shop in town was closed. We had a quick lunch, then back into jobs.

One funny part of the winemaking process is what we do with the leftover fruit skins. I checked next door to see if our neighbour was home (she sometimes likes the scraps for her chickens). They were out, so we headed to the back corner of the property, where we basically dump the scraps in a gully. Josh calls it "mulching", but I don't think that's technically what it is. (Side note: we had some university research students call in one day, wanting to collect vinegar fly samples. They nearly squealed with delight when we showed them our rotting scrap heaps, with swarms of vinegar flies hovering around.)

Pressed starfruit skins! With a cameo from Betsy.

Epic clean up process. :(

Josh "mulching" the gully

On the way back, we stopped by the pump shed to pause the irrigation watering, to load some fertiliser in the fertigation tank. Unbeknownst to us, the rubber seal fell off the lid and into the tank. After some searching around the tank, we figured the only place it could be was inside. 10 minutes of fishing about, Josh scooped it out and we could continue.

Fishing out the rubber seal :(

Long day. One last ride on the forks back to the shed!

By this time it was around 5pm, and getting cold and dark outside. We had an online order overnight for a product we no longer stock (oops!). We still had some in a tank in the cellar though, so Josh filtered out just enough to fill a bottle. I quickly labelled it, bubble wrapped it and packaged it up for postage today.

Nearly done for the day, I put a pot of sugar syrup on the stove to dissolve (to add to the star fruit wine the next day). Finally finished, it was 6pm and time to go "home". 6:01pm I was back in the donga for a shower and to cook dinner.

So, while it may not be too exciting, each and every day here at Ohana certainly is always different!

The Boss

So, Josh has decided to go away on a lad's trip this weekend, leaving me as The Boss.

In theory, it should've been a pretty quiet weekend. A group of 8 for lunch and tastings on Saturday, and that's about all.

On Friday afternoon I got a call from Pineapple Pete, our pineapple grower. He said that he has a bin of pines picked and waiting for us and asked what time Josh'll be there to collect them. Whoops.

Without a ute, or someone to drive it, we were a little screwed....until Josh managed to con our friend Timbo (absolute bloody legend!) into helping us out. Timbo came over and picked me up in his ute, and we drove the ten minutes out of town to Pete's pineapple farm. We found the right shed, and the right bin of pines...but there was no forklift. Luckily Pineapple Pete came to the rescue and used his massive tractor (with forks) to lift the bin onto the ute. Secretly, I think Timbo was pretty disappointed he didn't get to drive the beast...but there is always next time.

After a bit of manoeuvring, Timbo the expert forklift driver got the pines off the ute and into our cool room. A huge effort, and another job done.

My next job as The Boss was making another batch of Limoncello, our wildly popular lemon flavoured liqueur. I spent about two hours washing and peeling 90 lemons and prepared our alcoholic base for them to seep in for a few weeks. Another job done.

Saturday was supposed to be nice and easy. 8 for lunch and tastings - no big deal, I've done lunch and tastings for 50 without Josh before! Josh's mum arrived at about 11:30am and everything was prepped and ready to go. A car rolls up, then another. And another. For some ungodly reason, we were FLAT OUT busy all day. It's great, don't get me wrong, but we were both exhausted by the end of it. (I slept for 11 hours last night, and Von slept for 12. It was a big day!) Another day done as the boss.

Today has been a lot more relaxed. We sold out of most of our liqueurs yesterday, and without Josh here, it was time for me to be The Boss again. I managed to dribble out the very last of our Chocolate and Lemon Myrtle liqueur and get three more bottles on the shelf. We've also had some experimental Lychee Liqueur brewing, with some leftover lychees from our Lychee Wine batches. It tasted pretty good, so I filtered that into some bottles too - that was two more products on the shelf!

I've got a batch of Apple and Lemon Myrtle jam bubbling away on the stove now, so all in all a pretty productive day as The Boss again.

I'm not quite sure what Day 4 will hold, but I'm pretty keen for Josh to get home on Day 5!

Lemon peeling for Limoncello

Timbo having a play on the forklift/tractor/beast

Pineapples!! (On Tuesday we will be peeling, chopping and pressing these bad boys - if anyone wants to come and help, you're more than welcome!)

The cellar shelves, looking a bit bare and pathetic!