Hippy Winemaking Recipes

Greetings to the person looking for "Hippy Winemaking Recipes."

Look, I may giggle at hippies, but I have known many good ones. The good ones usually end up in rural Northern California and build harpsichords or become blacksmiths or raise cattle or goats or some such business. My favorite hippy is the Armenian grape farmer from outside of Fresno who swears that an Armenian wedding celebration is "exactly like a Grateful Dead show." This particular hippy drives into San Francisco with his wife to go to the opera. He's a real good guy. Gave me detailed directions on how to roast a lamb over an open fire.

The point is that hippies (whatever that means - I have my own idea, but it is a rather vague term), unless they are the sort of poseurs that hang around Haight Ashbury, do a lot of drugs, etc., spend most of their lives doing rather unremarkably normal things. They eat, drink, work, and the like the same way non-hippies do (again, I am excluding the trust fund hippies that one finds around certain areas).

The hippies that I have always liked tend towards natural things, good craftsmanship, keen appreciation of literature, etc. They might have bushy beards and longish hair, but they are often quite conservative in most things. I remember a hippy blacksmith in West Marin (the cool part of Marin, full of real hippies and Swiss Italian dairy farmers). He had the typical big black bushy beard, and longish hair, but was a great craftsman. My grandfather (a straight-arrow German Lutheran, member of the parish council, union ironworker, all of that), loved to talk to the guy about iron work design and techniques and the like. There was never any friction between them over hair or beards or living in Inverness or Sacramento or any of that. They were two guys who loved the craft of iron work. Whenever my grandfather came up from Sacramento with us, he would want to go over to this guys' shop.

So, a hippy wine recipe (unless you are looking for funny stuff in it, but who would want to louse up wine with funny stuff in it?), would be a well-crafted, probably organic (though not necessarily, as I have known plenty of hippy types who stridently disagree with organic labeling), probably with natural yeasts (more for the complexity that those can bring out over any other reason), probably with oddball varietals and cuvees.

So, since there is no real reason to make your own wine, with the glut in good wine on the market, unless you have that great hippy craftsman bent and want to try some cuvee that has been floating around in your head, I would suppose that all home winemaking recipes are sort of hippy recipes.