Last Day

The last day at the winery, bittersweet, dry, left a bristly tannic feeling in my mouth and a sharp hit of acid in the back of my jaw.  The wine is ready for the next step, to wait.  The work is done, and so am I, temp work is so odd like that.  The winery has gone from empty, to garnished, to overflowing crammed maze of large heavy containers, to juice, to barrels, to quiet.  Overworked equipment now hangs deep cleaned on hooks and racks on the walls, to remain there until it gets cold, then warm, then cool again.  Settling out and leaving only a few murmurs of life, the wine is put to bed in confined dark barrels, only to be stirred every week or every other to make sure it doesn't get too comfortable.  The wine is ready for the next step, to wait.  It’s hard to leave.

What are you up to??

Here is what I've been up to:
Cleaning
Barrel organizing
Forklift lessons
Sorting grapes
Cleaning
Organizing picking teams
Stomping grapes
Stem compacting/stem dancing
Bin/grape weighing
Additions to the wine to protect it and keep yeast happy
Pump-Overs
Giant Pump-Overs
Punching grapes
Stirring the whites
Draining bins
Cleaning "the press"
Pressing wine
Mixing wine
Barreling wine - YAY!
Cleaning again

Late September: Half days.  Getting off by 4 or 5pm.  Rain.
Mostly working with barrels and preparation.  By preparation I mean cleaning everything at the winery, making sure that the barrels were in order, and the barrel racks were clean.

Last week of September: Going to work at 8, off by 5 or 6pm.  Rain and cold.
Grapes arrived from California for Coelho's Portuguese varietal red blend
Grapes also arrived for the delicious port.  This was a nice slow and steady trickle with a slight foreshadowing of what more volume might look like with the high maintenance of the 4 or 5 fermenters and care that these took up.

First Week of October AKA "To pick or not to pick": Going to work at 8, getting off around 8 or 9pm.  Nice weather.  Stress out mode engaged.
Harvest came early this year and each day it was a debate between the family members of whether to pick the vineyard or not.  It comes down to the weather really, if you pick after or when it's raining, the grapes hold water and make the wine watery.  Who want's watery wine?  And of course the bird activity which is handled by some vineyards with shiny tape or scarecrows but by others with a constant boom of a cannon sound to scare them away.  David (our winemaker) took us on a wild country road ride out to the vineyard and showed us their beautiful farm and blocks of pinot, pinot gris, and chardonnay while the cannon boomed in the background.  A day or two later, the weather was right and the timing was great, we got 40 tons of the estate pinot, chardonnay and pinot gris in, nearly at the same time.  Once the grapes are in, there is no waiting around, it's go time and the grapes are like little ticking time bombs that burst into wine.

If you can imagine having 100 tons of grapes, what would you do with them?  Here's something I realized about expensive wine vs. cheap wine:
Would you:
- Sort out all 100 tons by hand, making sure to pull out all the 'bad' clusters OR dump the whole batch into the tank
- Keep the grapes on the stems OR de-stem the berries
- Put them all together in one tank, possibly risking the whole batch going bad but lower maintainence and cost OR separate them out into many different tanks, care for each one individually and choose when in the process to combine them, or blend them at the absolute end?
- Crush/Stomp the grapes OR let them ferment whole berry
- Keep the tank inside OR outside
- Inoculate the grapes with a specific known yeast OR let the grapes ferment naturally with whatever yeast they came in with from the fields

The whites are pressed immediately and put into barrels or "the cans" which are stainless steel barrel shaped containers.  The pinot was dumped in 1-2 ton bins onto a rotating sorting line where a crew of winery interns and temporary help.  This was a great opportunity to practice my Spanish while we picked out any moldy, vitritus, unripe, rotten, soft or raisin looking clusters before the grapes were hoisted by another rotating line that moves them up and through the de-stemmer.  The De-stemmer is a magnificent machine to rip the grapes off of their stems using a rotating grated cylinder with an opposite rotating center post with pegs.  It's deadly looking, and would definitely rip your hand off.  Also a bitch to clean since you have to take it all apart by awkwardly rotating a spiral out of a rectangular slit and carry each heavy part down an 8 foot ladder before pressure washing them.

The pressure washer- my new favorite thing.  I think I will put it on my resume.  There is nothing more satisfying to me than blasting a grape and juice covered sorting line, destemmer and hopper with extremely hot water coming out of a machine gun shaped hose nozzle in a flat laser-like beam.

October Daily Schedule:
Fill cleaning and sanitizer buckets
Set up pump immediately, we need them for everything.  Each pump has: An airhose, a main pump body on wheels, two hoses, a air pressure bell, a juice spear with an outside filter, a valve or two, two T shaped stainless steel connectors and about 8 gaskets and clamps.
Clean Fermenters.  Fermenters are like large square tupperware bins with no lids. They have about 24 surfaces on the inside that all need to be scrubbed clean. This could be for a fermenter should be cleaned so that we can put grapes in it, or clean a fermenter that just recently had grapes in it.  They never stay dirty long.
Clean the hopper, press, juice pan, pump, fermenter and grape fork
Dig grapes out of the 6K tank, alone in the darkness, for 3 hours.
Clean

Finally some pics!

New barrels

In the vineyard

Cleaning

Cleaning again here

Stomp!clean again

Pump overs! 

I've learned a lot about winemaking so far.  I've learned that cleaning the drains, and the sink, and the floors is part of winemaking.  Wearing galoshes, rubber gloves and suspender rain pants is also part of winemaking.  Getting pinched by an earwig, warding off yellow jackets, grabbing moldy grape clusters and fruit flies are all part of winemaking.  It also involves careful maneuvering of heavy equipment like barrels, barrel racks, wooden pallets, 30 foot ladders, grape fermenting tubs, pump hoses, pump valves and pumps.  A wine barrel is about 120 pounds when it's empty and new.  After it's used it gains weight from the seeped wine.  Full barrels weigh about 600 pounds, for real.  The theory of winemaking is so gloriously different than the practice of wine making because there are some things that just cannot be taught, let alone formatted into a course and graded with a test.

Details are everywhere and important to pay attention to and get right.  Which way should I stack the barrels so the labels are all facing the right way?  What kind of toast is this oak, where is it from, how many years?  Is the bung hole on the top at a 45 degree angle?  Is the barrel straight on the rack so stacked racks wont tumble over?  Did I put sulfer dioxide in that top left barrel?  Make sure to close that gas valve all the way.  When I'm moving a 5 stack of barrels with a pallet jack, are there little rocks that I could roll over and start a massive wobble?  Is this clean?  Is that clean?  Did I already clean this?  There are bacteria everywhere.  I need another bucket, with another scour pad and sponge.  Why are my hands so pruny and disgusting? Back to the details! How do I read this hydrometer?

Winemaking is as much planning and preparing as it is dealing with the unexpected.  There's no way that two vintages can be the same even if they both use grapes from the same location with the same process.  So many factors that add to the complexity and there's a whole range of results in almost every step in the recipe.  Growing the grapes is a whole different universe but up until the day they are picked we keep track of the temperature, note the rain and natural predators (birds, bugs, rodents) who wait for the same perfect timing to harvest.  Once the trigger is pulled, it starts a ticking countdown for nature to do it's work, winemaking is just harnessing and focusing that natural power.  The grapes are coming this weekend, no sleep till pressing.

Getting closer...

I’m finally getting that natural human feeling that winter is coming, and we have to start preparing for a long, dark hibernation period by harvesting the fruit and plentiful warmth.  For the 5 tons of grapes coming in tomorrow (tonight at midnight by way of refrigerated truck from Cali) we have followed the path that each grape will follow, scrubbing down each surface and tool with soda, citric acid, iodine and rinse.  From the truck to the scale, to the hydraulic lift into the sort line, dropping onto the grape ramp into the de-stemmer, falling into the 5 foot bins.  I’ll need to wear shorts tomorrow, cause we’re getting in.  How else do you think the grapes get crushed?  It’s all so jolly.

Full Moon on the First Day

It’s all the little things you forget about working a real ‘job’.  Things like bantering over what channel to listen to on the radio, trying to find the right size of work gloves, and filling out your time card.  Today I learned how to unload a 50 pound empty wine barrel from a trailer with an old tire, rolling the heavy barrel across the floor and lifting it up to my chest and onto another.  I also learned that old wine stains are grayish black and contain bacteria that can’t be sticking around on the barrel racks once the fruit comes in, and the only way to get it off is with soda (Oxyclean, pretty much) and elbow grease.  The only complaint that I had all day was that I forgot to pack a belt.  

I'm off!

I'm off to Oregon for the next two months to work the grape harvest!  I can't believe it's here, leaving tomorrow morning at 4 AM with my sister Clare to keep me company on the drive.  It's 11 hours to Boise, ID and another 8 to Portland.

Wish us and my car good luck!