Cold weather, Clear wine

Its been awhile since my last post, i guess nothing too exciting going on this winter. Been doing some x-country skiing and snowshoeing to get me out of the house and combat wintertime laziness, nothing I've felt the need to write about though. Guess i need to do something to combat the mental laziness that comes with winter time too.

I've been brewing beer off and on, but lately I've turned my attention back over to the wine. The cold month of January means its time to cold stabilize the whites and rack the reds into fresh glass carboys. Oh, can't forget to taste the progress of the wine to of course.
Cold stabilization is the process where wine is exposed to temperatures below freezing to encourage tartaric acid to crystallize and precipitate out of the wine, reducing the acidity and smoothing out the wine. To do this i transfer the wine from glass carboys to plastic. I've lost a few glass carboys in years past to frozen wine breaking the glass, which not only means losing a carboy but the wine that was in it.

 After transferring the wine into the plastic carboy it goes out to the garage for a few weeks and then will be transferred back into the glass and allowed to age another 3 months until it is time to bottle.
Next the reds needed to be racked into new carboys and set aside for another 6 months to clear before being bottled.

 The 11 gallons of DeChaunac were in the huge glass carboy which i had to lift onto the work bench. This thing is twice the size of the normal carboys i use and is quite heavy.

Once the reds were transferred and stored away, it was time to taste how the wine is progressing. Both whites were very clear and dry with a fruity taste. The Cab Sav. is not a robust red because we could not add the skins, so it is more like a fruity blush, a nice red for the summer that i can bottle with the whites. Above is the DeChaunac, which has a deep purple color and very rich in flavor, I can't wait to see what some aging will do for it.
After all that wine tasting we really needed to eat, so i decided to make a fried tofu dish. First i cut up some tofu and placed it dry in the skillet and placed on medium heat to cook the moisture out of them.

While those were cooking I mixed up a marinade using braggs (or soy sauce), mustard, coconut milk, curry, hot sauce, and pepper in a bowl and added onions. I removed the onions when the tofu was done and added it to the marinade.

I cooked the onions on medium-high heat and then added green beans and cooked until tender.

Then added the rest of the tofu with marinade and cooked until done.

Place on a bed of rice and this dish was amazing!!!

I think I'm going to makes some chili this weekend, I'll need it since i have the YMCA Polar Bear 5 mile run on Sunday. The forecast is calling for a high of  7, yeah that's right seven. I'll let you know how it goes.