The main ingredients for wine making are juice, sugar, and yeast. You simply mix them all together, let it ferment and if all goes well, you end up with a nice drink. It is easy, so it seems. However, the devil is in the details. I am not Jesus who changed wash water into good tasting wine in Cana. If I could, I would never buy wine again! “I will have a water, please.”
My wine making adventure started three years ago when I bought seven red grape vines and seven white grape vines from a nursery in New York. They arrived in May the following year and I planted them in a spot that I had rototilled about a hundred times, built a trellis out of treated post and high tinsel wire, and prayed that they would at least survive.
That is not all. The first year you pick off all the grapes, water them weekly and kill bugs and pull the weeds. Pruning was done after Thanksgiving and before Christmas. The second year there were few grapes, but the vines flourished and birds got fat. Last fall they were pruned again and this year they came on well and I now have two pickle buckets of red grapes including stems and skins. I will pick the white grapes tomorrow. Now, I get to cook them, put them through a food processor, strain out the fiber, and follow a recipe for correct amounts of juice, sugar, and yeast. The juice will then ferment in a glass jug with a stopper that will let the air produced by fermentation escape and keep bad stuff out. That is just the beginning! “The things I get to do after retiring!”
My motivation for making wine is that it is so often mentioned in the Bible. The Wedding at Cana, putting new wine into new wine skins, a little wine is good for the stomach, and most importantly, Jesus turns wine into his blood at the Last Supper before his Passion and Death. Jesus becomes present to us in each mass in the words of scripture and homily, but most importantly in receiving Holy Communion. I wonder what that wine, used in the Last Supper, tasted like. During the mass, time and space cease to exist as we once again become one with Jesus and all the saints and angels and members physically present in the Eucharist.
Wine is like that mystery. Individual grapes are crushed, fermented, mixed with water, consecrated and shared. Who could ask for more? We become the Bread and Wne, the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ, the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth, you and me, us!
As Monsignor Francis Koper says, “Brothers and sisters, all one in the Lord.”
I am looking forward with eager anticipation to going to mass again this week. Once again, I will experience the true presence of God in all that happens there. Not that I don’t experience God every day in ordinary circumstances, daily prayer times, nature, and encounters with those I love, I do! But in going to mass and communion I feel the ultimate presence of the God who suffered and died for me. Why? He loves me!
“May the Lord bless and keep you, may he let his face shine upon you, be gracious to you and give you his peace.”
