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!