So over the weekend my son and I bottled the first batch of wine I've made. Well, not the first, technically, if you want to count the balloon wine I tried, based on the bottom recipe at the link. In my case the juice was Safeway generic concentrated grape juice (not even the premium store brand!), and it was not a balloon but a latex glove for an airlock. Hey, it's what we had around. The glove worked very nicely, too: once fermentation started, it stood up and waved "hi", then drooped once the action slowed. I stored the result in pop bottles. It was never really drinkable, though a few glasses got consumed, and the rest went down the drain once I realized that it was starting to get worse.
This batch came from a kit, the cheapest one available. All sources (friends, Usenet, wine store experts) recommend adding lots of bulk aging to cheap kits, a month minimum, six months better. I compromised on a couple of weeks, having held off with samples from the dregs after various rackings. At this point, the result is surprisingly drinkable, if watery. My wife says it has less of the "dead animal" bouquet that was prominent at previous samplings.
It's been an interesting experience so far. I've learned lots of fancy wine terms, like "ullage", "breakage", and "spillage". I got a lot happier about my wine once I started thinking about it as homebrew. There was a cartoon illustration on the siphon I purchased (after yet another bout of "breakage" using borrowed equipment) showing a happy hairy guy cheerfully starting his siphon by mouth before bottling his homebrew. He wasn't concerned about contamination, nor whether the resulting beverage exactly matches some commercial product, and if he got a bit toasted while bottling, hey, bonus. Homebrew is cheerful, kinda cheap, and a little bit alternative. And popular in many areas, not just alcoholic beverages. The personal computer industry was started by homebrew. Off-grid power. DIYers have put more electric cars on the road than GM ever did. Home schooling. Home birth. Home and car renovation and repair. Et cetera et cetera...
What will the impacts of anthopogenic greenhouse gas emissions be? Who will bear them? What are the costs, what are the alternatives, both of avoidance and remediation, and what will those cost? Most importantly, from a policy perspective, how should we think these problems? How can we set up systems which will actually result in some reasonable outcome? I'm glad that nice smart people seem to be working on the problem, so I don't have to.
Other things I'm not reading that I feel like I ought to:
Stuff I'm reading that I probably shouldn't: