Read Online Dirty Chick by Antonia Murphy - Free Book Online

It’s not an alpaca. It’s just me.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    SHEEP ON A SPIT
    M arch and April see the end of summer in New Zealand, bringing cloudless days and the beginnings of a crisp autumn wind. Our house had a number of mature trees scattered on the property, and it occurred to me one day that they were laden with fruit. Peaches, quinces, apples, and figs—we picked them by the bushel and could barely keep up with the cascading harvest. These were not the perfect specimens I was accustomed to purchasing from supermarket shelves. Pick an apple, and you were likely to find it hollowed away by ravenous wasps. Quinces fell from the trees, where they rotted, growing swollen and black in the late summer heat. One day I bit into a peach, savoring the sun-ripened flesh, until the pit cracked open and an earwig slithered out.
    I dropped the fruit, spraying chewed peach on the deck.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with you?” Peter asked, looking up from the six-foot pole he was sanding. I think he was planning to herd alpacas with it.
    â€œThese peaches are full of bugs. And the apples have wasps. And I don’t have a clue what to do with the quinces.”
    â€œWhat’s a quince?”
    â€œExactly. I think it’s some kind of medieval thing. They made jam with it or something. And wine.”
    Peter stopped sanding. “You make wine? From a quince?”
    â€œWell,
I
can’t. But I’m sure it’s not that hard to do.”
    â€œAntonia.” Peter stared at me intently. “What’s our weekly wine budget?”
    â€œI don’t know . . . sixty bucks?”
    â€œSo start making wine! Think of all the money we’ll save! Thousands of dollars each year!” Peter paused to take a breath, his eyes growing manic. “Maybe it could be a business. Quince wines of New Zealand. It’s a fantastic business idea.”
    â€œEasy now.” I held up my hand. “Maybe I should make a bottle first, to see if it’s drinkable.”
    I ran the idea past Autumn. “Sure, lots of people do it,” she told me over the phone when I asked. “Cider mostly, but you can make wine with any fruit.”
    â€œDon’t you need yeast and sugar?”
    â€œCan do. Or you could go basement. Skin makes it all the time. Says he just puts a jug of apple juice on his kitchen bench, lets it sit till it starts to ferment. Then he drinks it till he gets the shits.”
    â€œSorry, who?”
    â€œYou haven’t met Skin? Aw, he’s great. Knows everything there is to know about country life.”
    â€œAnd his name is . . . Skin?”
    â€œYep. Married to Lish, the lady who drives the school bus. Anyway, he’s the one to ask about brewing country wines.”
    I guess I should have hung up and called Skin, but I have toadmit, I was intimidated. First, by the prospect of talking to an actual person named Skin, and then by the notion of a wine that you “drink until you get the shits.”
    So I got out a book from the library. A few pages in, I learned that wine making is really not hard. As long as you keep your equipment clean, it is actually insanely easy to make some very palatable country wines. Just about anything will ferment into alcohol, including pea pods, ginger, and those sneakers you don’t wear anymore.
    Well, maybe not the sneakers. But cider making couldn’t be easier. You grind up apples with a juicer, then add some sugar and wine yeast. Keep the juice in a covered bucket for a week or two, stirring it every day and leaving it in the sunshine to stay warm. Then you pour it into something called a demijohn, which is a giant glass jug that holds about five gallons of booze. Last, you fit an airlock and wait for a month.
    The resulting elixir is dry, delicious, and completely deadly. There’s a mathematical formula you can use to calculate the alcohol content of homemade wines, but after one glass I was too drunk