Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

Samantha has been working hard on finalizing our wine labels.  The general design and layout had been done for a while, but we had to get the labels sized correctly to fit our various bottle shapes, and we had to meet the specs of the printer.  The draft labels have been printed on two different types of paper so that we could see how well each holds up.  We actually made the bottles wet and put them in the refrigerator, and submersed them in ice water buckets to test the paper.  Now that we have all this done, we are submitting each label for approval to the TTB.

We also selected different color schemes for the various wines, and tried to match those colors to the available bottle caps.

We “spent a summer day” at University Park, to check out various majors at Penn State.  On the way back from State Cellege, we stopped at the Hawk Watch, on top of North Mountain – right “behind” our farm, and looked down into the beautiful Cumberland Valley:

So we finally found time to rack and bottle one of our Blackberry Wine experiments from last year’s harvest, a 2012 Blackberry, that was slightly oaked.  We were aiming for a full bodied wine, and used 90 pounds of blackberries for a 15 gallon batch – which gave us pretty intense flavors, colors and the full bodied taste we were after.  The wine is slightly sweet, with just a light oak flavor, barely enough to tell, but blending nicely with the fruitiness that the blackberries contribute.