August FBV meeting

 

 

We met at Bob's place.

The meeting was preceded by a 30 minute wine judging of some of the wines entered in the amateur wine making contest. 

The minutes were read and approved,
The treasurer reported that we have $450 in the bank.
In the officer's report Chuck Blethen discussed the herbicide overspray problem.
   Chuck said that he met with the GM of the French Broad Electrical Co-op and discussed the spraydrift problem.  He reports that FBEC will only not spray if surrounding vineyards are certified organic. 
    JD is still requesting some coordinate information from members to help vather information on the overspray problem.
    David Wijewickrama from Waynesville discussed the new vintner program being created at the Tri County Community College.  Surrey College is suspending its program due to lack of funding.
    Money sources for agricultural projects were discussed, including Gold Leaf and ARC funds.  It was suggested that if we had a well defined mission statement and project we could possibly qualify for a grant to fund those projects. 
   David suggested that we hold a meeting in November at his office in Haywood county.  He suggested that we might be able to get some political leverage through his contacts to help with some of our concerns and plans.
   Pete and Alan sugested that we have short term and long term plans before the November meeting.
   Alan wants each member to email him their suggestions for long term and short term goals for the FBV.

After the meeting Alan presented an interesting technique for calculating volumes when blending wines to get a desired alcohol or sugar content.  Its called the pearson's square and it works something like this:

                                      A                                   B



                                                        C

                             
                                     D                                      E

The highest concentration wine goes in A..In this example lets say its a wine with  15% alcohol
The lowest concentraton wine to be blended goes at D.  example 11% alcohol
The question is how much of A and D should be blended to produce a wine with a desired alcohol percentage which will be written at C.  (example perhaps we want 12 percent wine)
So in this example we write 15 at A, 12 at C and 11 at D.  Then we subtract c from a and put the answer at E and subtract C from D and put that answer at B.  (drop the negative sign)
So our square now looks like this:
                                  
                                         15                                     1

                                                       
                                                            12


                                           11                                    3

The square is now telling us that if we blend 3 parts of the 11 percent wine with one part of the 15 percent wine we will hit our target of 12 percent.
Nifty tool

                                         

 

Alan teaching the Pearson's square