i am really doing this wine thing. last thursday was our first day of harvest, or crush as we wine-people call it. this means the grapes are ready to be picked and the process of turning them into wine is begun. here is how we are doing what we are doing. it's quite descriptive and probably boring, but hey. no one said you have to read it...
each morning for the past week Ryan and I wake up early when it's still dark and so cold in our not-insulated shack. count-down to get out of our sleeping bags and into clothes, then a wet dewy walk in the long grass, a misty morning feel to it all, to the main house. inside we have coffee and toast and there's that feeling of it's-early-but-we're-in-this-together which makes the earliness somehow better. by 7:30 the harvest team has arrived and we are off to the vineyards in the truck. a stick-shift with a flatbed which makes me feel so super cool when I'm driving it. especially when I'm wearing one of my plaid shirts because I really feel like a farmer then. and i wear plaid almost every day.
the harvest team is only 2 or 3 latinos--they speak only spanish and I have had to brush up on my español so that we can communicate. They are really fast at picking grapes--in fact, in the time i can pick 3 buckets, they can pick 9. So, they clip grapes off the vines into buckets, and we haul those buckets into the flatbed of the truck and then drive them back to the winery. Once there, we dump the grapes into the de-stemmer where the grape clusters are tossed around between moving paddles, knocking the fruit off and out into a fermenter, and spitting the stems out the other end. The fermenter is about a 5 foot square of plastic and hold about 2 tons of grapes each. Once in the fermenter we stir in some sulfites to assist in the fermenting process, then cover it with plastic and let it sit over night.
So far we have harvested about 60% of the grapes from the vineyard which includes all our Pinot Noir, some Grenache, and Malbec. Still out there is Tempranillo, Merlot, and we are getting in 5 tons of Cabernet Sauvignon and Sirah from another vineyard in Washington. We'll be harvesting the rest of our grapes over the next week or so...
The grapes have now been separated from their stems and sitting in these giant plastic fermenters. In the de-stemming process some of the juice has already been extracted, so it's sort of like a soupy stew of grapes and juice. Into that we add yeast (smells like baking bread and reminds me of my mom and being little) which begins the fermenting process and we let them stand again over night. After a few days of sitting the whole grapes, extra seeds and skins start to rise to the top of the fermenter, forming a cap of dense mass with the juice all at the bottom. While in this stage we have to continuously (about 4 times a day) break that cap up and push it down so that the juice comes in contact with the skins--this adds flavor and other good stuff. This is called a "punchdown" and it's actually really tough and physically exhausting. especially at 7 in the morning or 11 at night...
So, the grapes sit in these fermenters and we have to work the cap down 4 times a day, and so far we have 12 fermenters so that's a lot of punch-downs. but we put on some rockin' tunes really loudly whenever we do punchdowns so that helps and we have a good time. I am not sure how long they will stay in this state. Felix said between 5 and 30 days is the norm. For our purposes, we'll keep punching 'em down for as long as Felix tells us to.
This is as far as we have gotten. It's interesting because Felix has given us a general overview of how this whole process works, but the specifics I am learning as we go. So, I have done all that stuff above, but the next stuff I am only speculating.
The next stage is extracting the "free-run" juice from the fermenters (i.e. all that juice sitting at the bottom of the fermenters) and putting that into barrels to age. The cap stuff (all the seeds and whole grapes and skins) we will put through the press, which has an air bladder that expands via a pressure pump. it presses the grapes along the side and squeezes any juice out which we collect and put into another barrel.
After that it will sit in the barrels for up to a year i think. Felix will add some sulfites again at various times and test and sample, and then at the end (a year from now for this wine) he will start mixing and making combinations and then he'll bottle, and label, and sell.
What's interesting is that the end part of this process, the tasting and bottling, labelling, selling and DRINKING is all happening right now too with last year's wine. So, when we aren't harvesting, or doing punchdowns, cleaning buckets, scrubbing fermenters, or power washing floors, we are labeling previous years bottles, bottling last year's wines, putting in corks, putting on foil, packing up boxes, and on the weekends: doing tastings for the tourists that are on wine tours of the Willamette Valley.
What else....oh: the Granache fruit we harvested a few days ago, Felix decided he wanted to make a Rosé out of it. SO. exciting exciting. We didn't add any of the fermenting stuff to it (no yeast etc.) and instead let it sit in it's skins for 2 days, the this morning....I put on my kick-ass (and I mean kick-ass) rubber boots, got them fully cleaned and scrubbed, and GOT INTO the Granache fermenter with a bucket. I scooped the grapes and juice into the press, then we pressed it and now we have about 50 gallons of pure Granache grape juice which is pink and so pretty in color, and super sweet. Now we will ferment it and THAT's how you make Rosé. Felix says you can also mix white and red wines, but he likes doing it this way: by extracting the juice from the grapes before you ferment it--that is, instead of with red wine, where you ferment the juice when it's still sitting in the skin and seeds, with rose wine you extract all the juice first and then ferment. now, with white wine you can do it various ways too: some people do the same process of red wine, but just with a white grape (like Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, etc.) OR, you can also just separate the pressed juice from even a red grape and, apparently, make Pinot Blanc...which Felix has done in the past. the point, is that the juice you get from just pressing the grapes is lighter, often clear and can make white wine. The juice you get from the skins and from everything fermenting all together is dark and red. It's complicated. and Felix is very much one of those "oh we'll add some of that here...about that much." and no measurements and it all seems to be eye-balled....so when he answers my questions (my millions and millions of questions) he usually laughs first, then answers somehow strangely, then says something that kind of makes some sense, and then I laugh and that's it. It makes it seem all very arbitrary. But, i do have a feeling that he is actually all very calcuating--he has to be!--and that he just appears to be so nonchalant about it all..
Who knows. is wine making an exact science? is it all just guessing? I think it's gotta be a mixture of the two: some precision, some playfulness. Either way, Felix is doing something right. We're making really really good wine. The people we have met from around here seem to all agree that Felix's wine is the best in the area. So, whatever his trick (and believe me, I'm trying to figure it out) it seems to be working.
Today, we made the Rosé, did 2 rounds of punch downs, cleaned and prepped for tonight, and had lunch. we are now waiting for Terry (a neighbor and aspiring wine maker) and Felix to return from Wala Wala Washington (it's a real place. i know) with the 5 tons of grapes, once they arrive we process them (ie put them through the de-stemmer and into the fermenter) and that might take a long time. but, there's always music and wine (lots of wine) and delicious food to keep us going.
This is amazing. really really amazing. I have been saying how the size of Carlo & Julian (this winery where I am) is so perfect because we do everything ourselves. and having no experience whatsoever means that everything is so exciting and new and since we are so small I am given real responsibility and real things to do. the other day Ryan and I were talking about how this year's wine, the 2009 vintage from Carlo & Julian will really have been made my us. him and me. Felix does it too, and he's around all the time, but we are the ones hauling the buckets and doing the punchdowns, and all that.
For instance, Felix left today to get the load of grapes from Washington and while he's gone another load will come in and it's up to us to do the whole processing thing one our own. it feels pretty great to know that he trusts us and has confidence in us enough, even at this point, to leave us on our own to do this whole thing.
Also, i get to drive the fork-lift.
last night was Felix birthday. and his family came over and we had a big party. played music and ate yummy yummy food. made me miss my family and Fall gatherings. it is definitely getting colder. and the air smells like Fall, and i am constantly reminded of apple picking and hot cider, crunchy leaves and cool breezes. I love the fall. I hate that I am missing a New England autumn right now, but...well I'm experiencing an Oregon one instead. and instead of apples and pumpkins we have wine and wine and wine.
