Peaches and Pressure

Something in Common

When you marry, you hope you share a few important things with your spouse: values, goals, a love of Italian food, and maybe a favorite movie or two. Sometimes the things you have in common come as a complete surprise many years after you were married. For example, the fact that both my husband and I tried making peach wine when we were kids. When that detail came up, we swapped stories and had some laughs.

His story was one of neglect. Here’s mine.

I was about fifteen and decided I was destined to become a winemaker. Some might say I learned the hard way. I prefer to think of it as an immersive educational experience. One that nearly got me grounded until bell bottoms went out of style and then came back again.

The setting: a trailer park in Southern Maryland. The kind of place where the grass grew only if the sand briars let it. Dogs roamed the streets of “the park” like rival gang members. Your neighbors knew what you had for dinner before you sat down to eat it. A place where a fifteen-year-old with a surplus of peaches, and no respect for chemistry, could spark a backyard disaster when making peach wine.

But really, the story starts a year earlier in my grandmother’s basement.

Making Wine with Grandma

My grandmother was a no-nonsense woman who kept things simple. One of her time-honored traditions was making Concord grape wine every year. Behind her house in Rixeyville, VA, a trellis of grapevines sagged under the weight of fat purple clusters. Some went to jelly…the finest I have ever tasted! The rest went to what she called “the good stuff.”

My grandparents treated all their grandchildren well when we visited. We were free to roam their farm and they fed us great. But they didn’t let us sit around and languish. So, during my late-summer visit, Grandma handed me a basket and told me to get picking. We chatted as we gathered grapes, and when the job was done, we hauled the harvest down to her basement where an old metal washtub waited. I imagined the transformation…fruit to juice to wine. It felt like magic.

Then Grandma went upstairs, saying something about getting “the masher.”

I didn’t know what kind of masher she meant, but I’d watched enough television to know how grapes got stomped. So, I kicked off my flip-flops, climbed into the tub, and got to work. It was cold and sticky and wildly slippery, but also oddly satisfying. The grapes popped underfoot like bubble wrap. The juice sloshed up my ankles. And later that evening I learned the seeds had definitely acted as an exfoliant for my feet.

Grandma reappeared carrying what looked like a medieval torture device crossed with a potato masher. She stopped dead in her tracks.

Winemaking in the Trailer Park

So, a year later, back in the trailer park, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. I’d try my hand at making peach wine. I knew all you needed was fruit, sugar, and yeast.  My mother had sugar and yeast in our kitchen. She’d also bought a giant bag of July Elberta’s—far more than our little household could reasonably eat. Being eager and resourceful—or, as my stepfather would later say, “the Einstein of bad ideas”—I sprang into action.

We had a collection of empty decorative liquor decanters—those odd-shaped bottles people used to turn into faux stained glass by adding colored water and setting them in their windows. I scrubbed ours clean, mashed up the peaches, added sugar and crumbled yeast, corked them tight, and stashed them…in our shed.

Turns out, the shed was less a wine cellar and more a solar oven in disguise. I didn’t dwell on that point at the time. All I knew was that I was making peach wine, and I was proud of it. I imagined friends and neighbors in the trailer park lined up to taste the finished product.

Unfortunately, fermentation has a dark side. When you trap fruit juice and yeast in poorly sealed bottles during a humid Maryland summer, things escalate quickly. The yeast went to town, producing enough carbon dioxide to launch a rocket.

I wasn’t in the shed when it happened.  Because it was two nights later when it happened.

I woke up when I heard a singular muffled pop followed by the sound of glass shattering. Then a short staccato of pops and glass hitting metal like an impotent fireworks finale. Immediately I knew what was happening.  My stepfather did not.

My Stepfather Reacts Quickly

I heard him come barreling out the back door of the trailer.  I looked out my bedroom window just in time to see him rounding the back of the trailer with a baseball bat in his hand. His head was on swivel, like we were under attack.  He grabbed the shed door and flung it open.

“What in the name of common sense has happened in here?!” I saw him fumbling around for the string of the overhead light. He clicked it on and gasped.

That was my cue.  I could only imagine what it must look like. 

By the time I got to the shed, a creamy, golden ooze was seeping into the grass like some kind of peachy crime scene.

Inside was chaos. The walls dripped with peach goo. Shards of glass sparkled like confetti. The air reeked of fermented fruit and disaster. It was like a distillery and a produce stand had exploded simultaneously.

I tried to justify my attempt at making peach wine, but he wasn’t having it. He had thought somebody was rummaging around in the shed to steal something. Since he was a US Marine veteran during the Korean War, the bat in his hand meant he had come to do business. He was now having difficulty standing down.

“Oh! You tried making peach wine? In the shed?  The place where we store the lawn furniture and Christmas decorations? And all of my tools?” His face turned a dangerous shade of red.

The Lecture

I nodded in answer to his rhetorical questions. Mentally, I admitted that common sense had warned me at the time. I had thought, for just a moment as I shoved the cork wrapped decanter tops into the bottles, that the fit wasn’t tight enough. However, I ignored that thought. That’s the true definition of “ignore-ance”: the proper thought flashes onto the warning center of your mind, and you ignore it.

“Well correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t know the first thing about making wine, do you?” He paused for my answer.

“Well,” I said, “I thought I did.” I was about to explain my prior training with Grandma, but there was no point.

What followed was a dramatic one-man play on fermentation, pressure buildup, and the legal drinking age. He used the baseball bat as his focal prop, underscoring and enunciating his soliloquy by jabbing it into the air. “Not just bootlegging! Under-age bootlegging!” he howled to the heavens. Then he launched into a colorful analogy about the shed being a giant tin can, baking in the summer heat. “Sealed tight and ready to blow! You basically built a fruit bomb!” he shouted hoarsely. He wrapped it up by assigning me a new job title, delivered with all the gravity of a court sentencing. Full-time shed janitor, effective immediately.

The Aftermath

After that, even the neighborhood dogs gave our shed a wide berth.  The peachy stench lingered well into the Fall.  My stepfather gave me the stink eye every time I even walked near the shed.

But, now I like to think it was all part of my education. A rite of passage. Because eventually, I did become involved with the production and sale of wine. However, my husband is the winemaker, and I stay out of his way.

Every now and then, I crack open a bottle of something pale and summery, catch the faint scent of peaches, and smile. Because no matter how far you go in life, you never forget the time you turned your family shed into a fruit-scented bomb site.

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© 2025 Terry Housel. All rights reserved.
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