That is probably the worst movie/history pun crossover in the entire internets. Anyways, we have wine!
First you gotta sanitize those bottles. We may be making Roman wine, but we don’t need Roman germs.
I use C-Brite sanitizer.
Then you make your boyfriend put the carboy on the counter for you.
It’s so clear, you can see from here to Guinness. BRILLIANT!
Once you siphen into the bottling bucket (best money ever spent, ever deal with bottling out of a carboy? Ung.) separate off the small batches of infused wines. Here is the Retsina with pieces of pine resin in the bottom, and the Rhosatum, with dried roses in a bag infusing in the pickle jar. These should be bottled by the end of the month. Pliny says to leave the roses in there for 3 months, but I’m assuming he meant fresh. I’m using dried, so I’d rather monitor what this is going to do and the flavor I’m going to get before creating a mess.
Retsina (resin) and Rhosatum (rose) wines.
I also separated my portion off for the Conditum Paradoxum, the spiced wine from Apicius. After gathering my ingredients, it all went into the pot for an hour on low heat to steep. The pine resin melted fast, which got me worried, but it was fine.
You can see the odd mix of ingredients here: dates, melting resin, bay leaf, saffron, black pepper, honey, and I threw in a cinnamon stick for fun and profit. And my stove is filthy. Welcome to brewing.
Once that was infused with the rest of the wine, it was strained and bottled. Here is the Conditum in the bottles next to the unaltered muscat wine I made.
Conditum on the left, plain wine on the right. You can see how the spices clouded the wine.
So, being the brave soul I am, I tried the Conditum in the period style, using warm saltwater to dilute it, as the straight liquor is extremely sweet.
The dilution cleared the wine, and brought out the infused flavors.
Bottling and infusing the wine today! Excited! Pictures to follow in tonight’s post.
In the end, I will have the following:
2 gallons of “Ancient White” Muscat wine.
1 gallon of Conditum Paradoxum (spiced wine from Apicius.)
1 gallon of Rhosatum (rose wine from Pliny the Elder.)
1 gallon of Retsina (resined wine.)
I’ve found a couple different redactions of the Conditum Paradoxum. I have one written down in my brewing journal (this is a must-have for anyone who brews as much as I do. I conjure up recipes and write them in, and track my progress on existing projects) but I found a different approach online I may go with instead. The basis of the drink is that you take a base wine, Apicius doesn’t say what color though both reds and whites were widely consumed by the Romans, and you make a must of honey, saffron, mastic, bay leaf, black pepper and dates. I don’t have any mastic, so I’m subbing in cinnamon. Plus, with my Retsina, I didn’t want to overdo it with that flavor. I *DO* have plenty of pine resin to work with, so that is still an option.
The rhosatum is getting treated exactly as Pliny says: put rose petals in a bag, put it in the must, close the sucker up and then let it sit for 3 months. I’m assuming he means fresh petals, and I’m using dried, so I’m going to be monitoring the color of the liquor and making sure nothing goes funky in there. If I stop the infusion early, I stop it early. No big.
The Retsina doesn’t have a clear cut recipe. I’m more or less trying to re-create a flavor profile than an actual recipe. Originally, Greek and Roman wines got the resin flavor from the use of pine resin as a sealant on the amphorae. Being that I don’t have an amphora, (I’ve looked, they’re expensive to get made) I’m cheating and tossing an ounce of resin in the wine and letting it age a month. If this works out, I’ll bottle the wine and seal the top of the bottles with resin like wax as a nice touch.
I’m going to let the wines bottle age a minimum of 3 months, so my first bottles should be ready by Pennsic War, at least of the Conditum Paradoxum (which I plan to panel with hot seawater to dilute it with!)
More updates today as it comes, live, from Black Dolphin Brewing!
All the content is the same, but I’ve moved it from Blog.com to WordPress.com for several reasons.
1: WordPress has more to work with.
2: Blog.com gets practically no search engine exposure, no matter how much you SEO the thing.
3: Blog.com has NO customer service. None. No technical support, and they barely update their own sites. I purchased a domain through them for my author blog, now at http://ofsummerandwinter.wordpress.com, and I accidentally let it expire. When I renewed it, the domain did not get re-attached to my blog. So, after trying to fix this, I contacted their tech support, and got no answer. For weeks now. I sent them a tweet . I posted on their Facebook. Nothing. They provide no emails for anything, and come to find out, my domain is locked, and registered to a company in Germany, and I cannot unlock it to transfer it. So I’m out $18, and relatively pissed that neither of my sites were getting traffic anyway.
4: Ads. Ugh.
Therefore, I am now on WordPress. I have no idea why I even bothered with Blog.com other than to try something new. Please stay away from them. WordPress is the superior platform for these types of sites.
One of the first pieces of Roman clothing I made was the stola, or, overdress of a matron. I was married at the time and it seemed like a good idea. I wish I could find pictures of the construction of it, because as far as a “tube dress” goes, it was a pain, being that i made it to almost-period specs, and it’s about twice my height clocking in at 8 full yards of this sassy red linen, and I still didn’t get the neckline right. I’m planning to make another one, um, eventually. With a proper institia, more on that as it comes and I can do more research on what it should look like exactly.
Here’s my first Roman garb EVUR. (I think this was 2008?) That white chiton still hasn’t softened.
ROMAN BLIMP. WIDE BERTH, PLZ.
And here it is as a stand-alone garment, which is how I wear it more often, however in that case, it is NOT a stola, just a form of a peplos without the peplum. I do plan on fixing the neckline eventually, because this is such lovely red linen, I’d hate for it to go to waste, especially at a whopping 8 yards in one dress. At least it fits better now that I’ve, uh…filled out.
Complete with adorable and totally period Northern Army trim girdle.
This was posted to me on the Booke of Faces, and it’s dreamy. Obviously I can’t read Russian, so I’m not sure if they are displaying Byzantine OR Russian in the earlier images, but the cultures do have a very heavy overlap when it comes to clothing. The shot of the superhumeral and cuffs are worth it alone, and gives you a good idea of how such accessories would have been closed and worn.
The Viking images are also REALLY worth it. I really like that apron dress style and I think that will be my next attempt. I love my heavily embroidered dress, but something a bit more…casual will be nice. And, oh look! Embroidery. Take that you fantasy Viking dress haters! 😉
I just got back from a few days down in the lush green tropical homeland of Florida to return to the cloudy, 30* maritime climate of the Arctic. Okay, so RI isn’t the Arctic, but that gosh darn groundhog LIED.
Hit the Bay Area Renaissance Festival in my new totally inaccurate but blasty-blast to wear Gahwazee outfit, complete with tassel bra goodness. Hey, it’s a fair! I can wear what I want! Next on the hit list is my mom.
The family that garbs together, stays together.
The outfit was pretty easy, I used a Simplicity pattern and just sorta…zoomed it up myself. The gomlek (undertunic) I whipped up with my imagination, using the funky selvages to my advantage, the bra is one of my old ones I bled all over trying to glue and handsew trim onto, and the skirt is just your run of the mill tiered broomstick or belly dance skirt. I believe it’s an 8 yard. I went with this look because Florida is hot when Rhode Island is not, therefore, I can have some fun. If it was going to be a cooler weekend, my actual SCA period Turkish would have been in order, but at least I got compliments on my…rack. The underbust Turkish coat is documentable to the 18th Century, when fashionable Turkish women were attempting to emulate the shapes of the Western women, notably the garish French. The tassels and the way I did the gomlek? Erm…not so much. That’s just for boogying at the festival. This will get some Pennsic wear, but probably with the neckline of the gomlek close.
Pre-Renaissance Festival filth. Kinda cursing myself over using the antique sari on the bottom.
Aside from that, I got to hit a couple of spring training baseball games, and sat at the kitchen table working on my undergrad thesis. The fun, let me tell you…No, I’ll tell you it’s most definitely not fun and I’m regretting going back to school at 28 (now 30) to get my bachelors when it should have been done 10 years ago. Life has a way of getting in the way. The thesis is The Varangian Guard, and their recruitment and downfall due to the First through Fourth Crusades. It sounds cooler than it is. In the immortal words of the old knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “You chose…poorly.”
The Varangian Guard don’t get a lot of press, surprisingly, so it’s been a bit of a witchhunt. I’ve done some preliminary research for my book, Of Summer and Winter (shameless, I know) but I wanted to further myself as an academic, and at least have some really real for real research knowledge to back up my fiction.
In other news, I received my East Kingdom Artisanal Exchange Swap III gift this week! I was so excited when I opened this, aside from feeling like a total slacker for not having mine done yet.
It’s a lovely red coral and bronze necklace and fibulae set, using both Byzantine and Western Roman design features in the necklace. I CAN NOT wait to wear this. I feel like I need new garb just to do it! (I’ve been wanting a dark blue peplos…;) )
Racked the wine to the secondary today. It’s fermenting like a madwoman. I probably could have let it go longer, but the boy needed the larger carboy for his beer that he’s working on today. Either way, I plan to leave it in this carboy now for at least a month before the clarifying process. I picked up another 1 gallon jug today as well, now I have 2, which will be important for when I do my separate infusions of the rose and resin. As of this point, I’m not thinking they will be ready for paneling at War of the Roses (Memorial Day weekend) so at the earliest I should have a drinkable product by Pennsic, and especially good next year, as I intend to age as much as possible. It is wine after all. Though the Romans did drink a lot of young wine. Mostly because it was the primary beverage of choice, and though there were period winos (Pliny most certainly one of them) that did enjoy ages wines, there is no harm in younger beverages.
I also signed up for the Nobelese Largesse swap today via Facebook. It’s a Knowne-World wide artisanal swap that requires documentation. I cannot post what I am doing or who I have or pictures until the gift is sent for obvious reasons, but I am looking forward to participating in this one. 🙂
I am also involved in the East Kingdom Artisanal Swap for my second round. That gift has been finalized, and I am working on getting everything together to complete it. My previous swap gift went to Konstantia Kaloethina in Calontir, the founder of the NL swap, and I made for her a Byzantine Superhumeral out of shot purple silk, with some amethyst and pearl beadwork. I left it plain since we had discussed prior to me even having her as a swap recipient that she wanted one to adorn with her award medallions, but did not know how to sew one for herself.
I received in the swap a lovely wooden chest with my arms on it, and a couple of brass and bronze medallions from Sir Yessunge Altan, I was blown away.
You can see the type of work that goes into these swaps, this is why I’m so excited for NL, being limited to 40 participants, and worldwide. I do love a challenge!
I just knocked out my 2nd annual gallon of espresso cordial. It won big at the Bridge Birthday drinking, I mean, Brewing Contest, also known as “Pickle the Baron.” The recipe is proprietary, sorry, folks. 😉
The original name of it was “Dark, Dirty, and Whipped,” but I think I’m changing it to “Auntie Anna’s Award-Winning Marriage Proposal Juice” or something along those lines, as I have never been offered hands in marriage by so many people at once.
I also tried a new sekanjabin recipe today, and this is a Pomegranate Balsamic variant. The redaction is below:
2 cups of POM juice
1 cup water
1 cup balsamic vinegar (NOT vinaigrette! That’s dressing. LOL.)
4 cups of sugar
boil together for a half hour, cool, and bottle. Easy, peasy, tasty. The color is a dark burgundy/brown, and the flavor is very caramely and almost tea in nature from the balsamic, plus the juice. It’s very sweet, but I can see it being VERY nice on a hot day in ice cold water. So this will be popular at Pennsic.
So I now have 4 full sekanjabin recipes I can easily produce. However, the boyfriend does not enjoy it that much, so I can’t take over my kitchen with bottles of syrup, lol. I guess I’ll have to take my time with them, though I STILL want to try cinnamon with apple cider vinegar. 😉
I made rose sekanjabin for the first time today, so I documented it by video. Sekanjabin is a syrup with origins in Medieval Persia. It’s typically made with mint, but a variety of substitutions can be made. In this case, I used dried roses, since I have way too much for my wine.
The video will take you through the steps, but here’s the recipe:
2 1/2 cups of homemade rosewater (I boiled 4 cups of dried rose petals and buds in 3 cups of water. I had to add more water a couple of times to get the right amount.)
4 cups of granulated sugar
1 cup of white wine vinegar
Combine ingredients and boil for a half hour. Let cool. Syrup keeps indefinitely in a bottle without refrigeration.
The wine kit was put to primary fermentation today! I will secondary in a week, then let it sit a month before conditioning, and splitting it into the different jugs for the Roman infusions.
Cloudy…I assume it’s going to clarify during the process.
I’m also starting to play with gin. Gin is actually a period beverage, well, it wasn’t CALLED gin, but juniper infused spirits go pretty far back, I believe the 11th Century. Let’s face it, gin is an acquired taste. My acquisition came and went after a long night of drinking that got capped with a G&T, so, I got revisited by the gin first. ~_~ This infusion is peppermint and roses. It took VERY fast, like, overnight fast, and I already strained it and started a new batch.
Anna's New Rome 
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