Vin de Noix, Part 1

This morning, the fingertips on my left hand are stained yellow-brown, the result of one of the processes in making Vin de Noix, a walnut flavored wine aperitif.

My sister, Christie Clary, lives on the family ranch in El Dorado county, in the foothills of the Sierras. In the mid 1970's, my grandma gave 4o acres of the family homestead to my parents. My Mom & Dad planted about 6 acres of walnuts. Now, over 30 years later, Christie has found a way to make a delicious beverage that has drawn rave reviews wherever it's poured.

The process begins by picking the walnuts when the hulls are about 1 to 1-1/2" in diameter, when the nutmeats are just beginning to form and the shell is still soft. Traditionally, in parts of Europe where walnut wine originated, the harvest happens on June 22, the summer solstice. The window of harvest is short - perhaps two weekends.

We're producing enough Vin de Noix to utilize one barrel of wine. We began our work yesterday with about 1800 freshly-picked little walnuts. Wearing vinyl gloves to protect against the staining that comes with handling walnut hulls, we sliced the walnuts into quarters. A pale yellow liquid oozed from the cuts. As we completed our batches of 100 nuts at a time, we poured off the liquid that remained on our cutting boards over the sliced nuts and dumped the whole shebang into a 200 gallon tank. After about 3 hours of slicing and dumping, we were nearly done with step one.

Glad to be finished with this part of the work, I pulled off my gloves. That's when I discovered that vinyl gloves aren't a good choice for protecting my hands from the stain! The stain had penetrated through to my fingertips. A childhood of walnut harvesting tells me it will be quite a while before the stain wears off.

At the end of step one, we poured the wine over the walnuts. It will steep for 40 days. Meanwhile, we'll need to order 375 ml bottles, design labels and so on, so that we're ready to bottle when the process is done. There are more steps in the recipe, and I'll go into more detail in future blogs.