vine-leaf rolls from the garden in the dead of winter

This weekend it was definitely the first bitterly cold weather we've had this winter. Since I didn't want to leave the house, I decided it was a perfect occasion to get a little reminder of summer.
In early August I had preserved two jars-full of vine leaves from our concord grape vine in the backyard. I'd been thinking about what a shame it was that this beautiful vine didn't produce decent tasting grapes (they're all skin and pit and unbelievably sour). Suddenly, it struck me that it might be possible to use the leaves for vine-leaf rolls, aka dolmas, aka dolmatas. So I did some research on how to preserve the leaves in brine and spent a hot afternoon in my kitchen blanching the leaves, rolling them into tight little bundles and stuffing them into jars of salt water. About 3 hours worth of work added up to two jars full.
Rick and I used the first jar at the Cottage on the Labour Day weekend. We made about 36 dolmas as our contribution to the Saturday night feast. Just as Rick and I finished rolling up the last cute little packages, the power went out. There was quite a wind storm blowing and it was a surprisingly cool weekend for September. Fortunately, we'd had the woodstove on. So we put the big pot on the woodstove to slowly simmer. After a couple hours at this very low heat, we had some pretty wonderful dolmas. They were a hit, even with my vegetable-phobe uncle Bill.
So this weekend when it was super cold, I thought I'd use the second jar and repeat our success. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the original recipe and I tried to remember what I'd put it them. Then I drank quite a bit of wine while making them and got a little over-zealous in how much of the rice-mixture I put into each leaf. I failed to account for how much the partially-cooked rice would still expand inside the leaves when I simmered them. (A thing I should have remembered from my favourite Horatio Hornblower story where his ship sustains a cannon-ball hole below the water line. The cargo hold is full of rice, which starts to expand as it takes in water. Eventually the whole ship comes apart at the seams!)
As a result, the dolmas didn't turn out quite a beautifully as the original set. There was a few that had to be completely abandoned. The rest were edible only if you held them over a plate when you took a bite. All the stuffing would fall out instead of staying neatly packed in the leaves. They tasted pretty good, but were missing the fresh herbs that we had in the summer.
Still, it was a nice feeling to look out on the blowing snow in the backyard and taste a little bit of the summer garden.