August 2008 Blog Archives
Gustav's Apple
Posted by: Greg on August 29th, 2008
Here in Southeastern Louisiana, we are waiting for the arrival of Hurricane Gustav, which is projected to make landfall on early Tuesday morning somewhere around Morgan City and that places St. Tammany Parish on the east side of the storm which is the most damaging side. Not only do I have to worry about possibly property damage due to strong winds and rain, but I also have to worry about loss of power for I don't know how long, and on top of all the other troubles a hurricane brings, I now have to worry about keeping the fermenting temperature down on a batch of apple wine that is still in the primary. I will be tranferring the wine to the secondary tomorrow morning and spend the rest of the day glued to the TV set for further updates on the projected path of Hurricane Gustav. We was going to name this wine "Adam's Apple" but that was before Gustav threatened Southeastern Louisiana, so we decided to name the wine, "Gustav's Apple".
Just in case, we do lose power, I do have a generator that I can use to power our refrigerator, freezer and other appliances, but my generator has a limit and I will have to use it wisely to get us through the days and possibly weeks of no power after the hurricane. I also have to think about how I'm going to keep our other aging wines cool if we lose power and that is going to be a real challenge. If need be, I have a 110 volt air condition window unit that I can use to help cool our aging wines. This coming Sunday, the National Weather Service should know exactly where this storm is heading, so it is a waiting game for us.
Unsuccessful SQL Injection Attack
Posted by: Greg on August 9th, 2008
This morning, I checked my Latest Visitors log to see how many people visited this site in the last 24 hours and I noticed three different IP addresses tried unsuccessfully to inject a virus into this website using a SQL Injection script. There was one major problem that the attackers encountered when running the script on my site - this site doesn't have a database to infect, it is all HTML code! The attacks was unsuccessful!
Short sample of the attack:
?';DECLARE%20@S%20CHAR(4000);SET%20@S=CAST(0x4445434C415245204054207661
3415445205461626C655F437572736F72%20AS%20CHAR(4000));EXEC(@S);
The attacks came from:
Beijing, China
60.189.110.254 | Date: Aug 09 06:05:03 | ISP: CHINANET-ZJ TAIZHOU NODE NETWORK
Lisbon, Portugal
213.22.1.178 | Date: Aug 09 04:19:10 | ISP: TVCABO-PORTUGAL CABLE MODEM NETWORK
Taipei, Taiwan
118.166.134.174 | Date: Aug 09 00:00:16 | ISP: CHUNGHWA TELECOM DATA COMMUNICATION BUSINESS GROUP
If you own one of those IPs, it is likely you no longer are in control of your machine, because your computer is infected with a virus that has hijacked your computer and is using it as part of a botnet to further spread the virus. If this is not the case, you just embarrassed yourself and you will never be nothing but a ignorant script kiddie!!!
Website Update
Posted by: Greg on August 3rd, 2008
First of all, I must apologize to everyone who uses Internet Explorer (IE), it seems I found quite a few problems while updating this website such as our vacation page that wasn't displaying right and thumbnails on other pages that wasn't working properly when click on. IE was the only browser affected by the problems I found, but I have corrected the problems and everything on this website should be working properly.
Mozilla Firefox is the only browser I use and whenever I make changes to this website, I check all the pages of this website with Firefox to make sure everything is working properly. I keep forgetting to check this website with IE to make sure everything is working properly in that particular browser. Without getting too technical, IE is not as forgiving as other browsers when it comes down to HTML code that makes up this website. For instance, you can code a HTML page and it looks perfect using Firefox, but then when you check it with IE, it doesn't look right for various reasons which most of the time involves HTML code. Sometimes it is a real challenge to make everything look and perform right between the two browsers.
Lalvin Bourgovin RC 212
Posted by: Greg on August 3rd, 2008
Lalvin has been our primary yeast of choice for all our fermentation needs since we begin making wine. In the past, we've used other yeast manufacturers with good results, but we feel the best overall performing yeast comes from Lalvin. Last month, we used Lalvin Bourgovin RC 212 for the first time on a small experimental batch of Wild Blackberry/Black Currant. Most of the time, when we are sitting around the house thinking up new recipes using different blends of fruit or berry ingredients and wondering how they will taste together, we'll ferment a small experimental batch of wine, age it for 4 months or so and taste it along the way to see if it is worthwhile to ferment a bigger batch. If the batch turns out not so good, we use it as drain cleaner and our little experiment doesn't end up costing us an arm and a leg, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, during primary fermentation, I really didn't notice anything out of the ordinary that might have alerted me that something was wrong when I checked the progress of the wine daily as I often do whenever we are fermenting. After secondary fermentation was complete, I popped the airlock off the carboy to rack the wine off the lees into another sterilized carboy to start the clearing process and that is when my nose detected a strong "burnt match" odor. The first thought that popped into my mind was hydrogen sulfide (H2S) which is an odor that I'm very famaliar with being that I work for a water & wastewater utility company and we all know what sewer smells like – pee-yew! At the time, I wasn't sure what could be causing the H2S problem, until later on in the day when I visited my favorite online winemaking discussion forum – Winepress.us, where I read a thread posted by a member who had a similiar problem using the same yeast strain.
After reading the thread thoroughly, it seems Lalvin Bourgovin RC 212 yeast requires high nitrogen nutrient additions to avoid the potential development of H2S. I checked my wine log to see if I had added the proper dosage of yeast nutrient and campden tablets to the must prior to fermentation and everything looked in order. I know without a doubt that my equipment was sterilized prior to preparing the must for fermentation, so I ruled out possible bacterial contamination due to poor sanitation. Since this was the first time I used this particular strain of yeast, I thought maybe the yeast nutrient that I was using might not contain a high enough dosage of nitrogen or diammonium phosphate (DAP) that this yeast requires. After closer examination of the label on the bottle of yeast nutrient that I used, I determined that my yeast nutrient wasn't sufficient enough for this yeast.
Now that I solved the mystery of the H2S problem with my wine, it was time to treat the wine in order to head off more potential problems. Because H2S is highly volatile, it is easily removed by splash racking the wine several times in a carboy or vessel which allows oxygen to come in contact with the wine and the oxygen counteracts the H2S, which is exactly what I did. I measured the sulfite level in the wine with a test kit and it was ok. I used KITOSOL 40 to fine the wine and three days later, the wine was crystal clear with no odor of H2S.
Wheeew, I'm glad that is over with!
