First (Real) Day of Class

Well, that 7 inches of snow was enough to shut down the south for 4 whole days. Even though it doesn't seem like that much snow, the biggest problem was the ice from the melting snow. Each day it warmed up just enough to melt more snow, the water covered the side walks, and Furman's sidewalks became one huge ice slick. Also, we have no plows or salt trucks down here to help clear the roads.......

Anyway, here we are on Friday and finally we had our first day of class. We lost basically an entire week of class time, but the professors are just making do with the time they have and it will work out fine.
Today in the regional agriculture class we sure got off to a good start- we sampled 6 different kinds of olive oils, a variety of brined olives, and we started making our own wine.




To taste olive oils, the procedure is pretty similar to that of wine tasting. You are supposed to cup the sample to heat it up and capture the aroma, inhale to smell it, and then take a sip of the olive oil-- enough to cover your whole tongue. Olive oils are usually divided into 4 main flavor categories-- mild and delicate, fruity and fragrant, olive-y and peppery, and leafy and grassy. We used a granny smith apple to cleanse our palates in between samples.




We also tried a variety of olives....and I'm just not a huge olive fan. By the end though, they were starting to grow in me, so my plan is to keep trying them until I like them. I've been told that if you can try a new food 7 times within a reasonable time frame, you can acquire a taste for it.

We also started making our own wine (chianti). Dr. Hestermann ordered a kit from Amazon. Basically it's a bag of concentrated grape juice and a separate pouch of champagne yeast. We poured it into a prepared 6 gallon bucket, added water, added the yeast, and now have to wait a week for the wine to ferment.



After a week, the wine will be decanted into another container where it will further develop for about 4 more weeks. If we're lucky, it will be ready before we go, but more than likely, the wine will be ready once we come back from Italy. The entire kit makes 32 bottles of wine (or 6 gallons)....not bad for a $45 starter! That's a LOT of wine!



We tried the juice once it had been diluted but before we added the yeast and it just tasted like syrupy-sweet grape juice. I'll be very interested to see how the final product turns out!