so much wine

too much wine! so much wine!

in india people would frequently mix up "so" and "too." this meant they were often saying things like "we are having too much fun here" instead of "so much fun. Madeline, the 5 year old i live with, has this same problem. it brings back great memories and makes me think of Mallory on a daily, often 10-minute basis (!)

anyway, the point is that we are making too much wine! as in so much. the fermenting process, and the punchdowns 4 times a day are winding down. the wine has been sitting, we've been adding yeast food, punching away at it each day, and a few days ago we started taking some it to barrels! this means draining the fermenter of "free-run" wine at the bottom directly into a barrel. the rest of the grapes and skins and seeds which have been resting on the top as a "cap" of sorts, still has good juice in it, so we put on all-natural rubber boots (first we clean them off, make 'em smarkle. just a little.) then hop into the fermenter and hoist buckets of soggy grape-seeds-skins into the press. then we turn it on and a rubber bladder inflates and presses the grapes and whatenot against the sides and out pours "pressed" wine. which pump into another barrel. in the winery room downstairs, a sort of 2nd level down the hill, we have so far filled about 20 barrels with this years vintage. each barrel holds 60 gallons so...as i say, that's a LOT of wine. and we've only done the Pinot Noir so far! we still have about 9 fermenters to go of the other kinds of grapes.

so, we are busy. every day is still the same really. in a good way. wake up in the cold cold, convince ourselves it's really necessary to get out of warm sleeeping bags and into the cold jeans hung on my rafter beam, walk to the house for coffee and breakfast. we start still with punchdowns, and then get to pressing.

Lately, tho, other jobs have cropped up as well. for instance a few days ago Felix rented a wood splitter. an electric one, which i quickly learned how to use. I chopped SO so so so too much wood. ear plugs and the whole shebang. felt like such a lumber jack. i have no idea how people measure wood chopping, but i chopped for about 4 hours and its a lot of wood.

Or, even better was yesterday. Right before Ryan and I arrived here one of Felix's ewe's got out and was roaming the area. yesterday we got news that she was in the neighbor's property so we dropped our pressing work and went on a ewe-hunt. basically we had to try to corner her, but forgot to close the gate to another pasture so she got away, then it turned into this poor creature trying to escape between us and damn was she fast. finally, felix managed to tackle her and so we carried her home on our shoulders. that was quite the adventure.

anyway, life is great. busy and long days. tons of work, but great wine and great fun. we've been working sometimes late into the evenings which has been rough, but still somehow manageable because it's all really fun and i enjoy what I'm doing.

and being a farmer, well it takes a bit to get used to it, but it definitely is a comfortable place for me. spending more time dirty than clean, never getting the dirt or grape residue off your hands, wearing the same dirty jeans you wore yesterday, all of it--it's different from living in New York City, or Boston (not to mention India and Kenya..) and that takes getting used to at first, but now that I'm in it, and living it, I really am loving it and I'm so excited that I'm staying for another month and a half.

and im also excited that we are putting our wood stove into our shack today and tomorrow because it is getting really really cold.

happy birthday to me

happy birthday to me yesterday. great day.

apple pie cake.

crush!

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.

life in Carlton...

i cannot imagine a more perfect few day in a new life. in this new life of mine:

it began a few days ago when Gen and I went out in Portland on Friday night--what a great city! we walked around the city, got a free bike taxi ride to a crepe place and listened to some live music through the open windows of a bar. then we scouted down ice cream cookie sandwiches and ate them. yum.

saturday afternoon after i finished work we took one of Gen's new friends, Evan, with us to the coast, to a tiny town called Pacific City. There we made some new friends: about 30 people were sky diving and they kept just appearing in the sky, and landing on the beach. So i went up to this guy, Steveo who sky dives for a living, and we started chatting and he invited us to a party in town later that night. Which we went to, met some crazy folks and went back to the beach where we built a bonfire and slept out under the stars.

we drove back yesterday (sunday) and picked up Ryan, the other intern here at Carlo & Julian, and all four of us went to the drive-in movie theater in Newburg down the road. We saw Grease. Afterward, Ryan and I came home to our little cabin, and lay on the newly finished deck outside, and searched the skies for shooting stars. we saw 2. maybe 3. the bugs were quite deceiving.

i woke up at 7:30 this morning, as usual, and ryan and i made the trek to the main house for our morning coffee. I washed some clothes, hung them on the line, and started work. Ryan and I painted the porch of our house, then we scrubbed about 50 buckets that we'll use to harvest grapes, then broke for lunch of homemade quesadillas. After that we went into the winery and added SO2 to the barrels of last years wines--adding it works as some part of the second fermentation process. Next we topped other barrels (which means adding more wine so there's no empty space for oxidization to happen) and tasted different varieties, helping Felix decide which we were ready to be bottled. Felix, my boss, is great--he's from Argentina, and knows so so much about wine and wine-making. today he told us alot about the process of getting from grape to barrel to bottle. as expected, i asked a lot of questions.

so, then my working day was over. i called my sister and mom, and booked a ticket home for thanksgiving, went for a run around the little town of Carlton, played make-believe with 5 year old Madeline (the daughter of my boss) about trolls and magic spells, and then came to the house for a delicious dinner of wine (ours! of course), quinoa, veggies from the garden and chicken. I'm not sure, but I think the chicken was also ours and Felix (my boss) killed it earlier today.

now it is after dinner. I will play the piano for a bit, then head back to my little hut which has 1 outlet (we have to choose between light or music at night), and curl up in my sleeping bag, play some guitar and watch for more shooting stars.

tomorrow we are moving pallets around the winery, and cleaning everything in preparation for harvest and crush---which will start sometime later this week.

i love to be here. i love that i get to be here. i love that i am now learing about wine, that i will continue to learn more and more each day. I love that i live in a 200 sqaure foot shack that has no interior walls and only 1 plug. i love that i can see the milky way every single night, that we eat delicious dinners of homemade food, that i get to play make-believe with a 5 year old. that i live 10 miles from Genevieve and can go exploring Oregon wilderness with her and visit cute McMinnville whenever I have time off.

I am truly truly happy to be out here and I can't wait for our first load of grapes to come in so we can really get this crush-party started.

i am so lucky to have the luxury of time to be where i am.

today i woke up at 9 and,s after my ritual romp in the blueberry and strawberry patches to find fixings for my granola (which i made) to munch for breakfast, I tromped some more off into the garden for some harvesting. i got about 10 onions, handfulls of fresh oregano, basil, rosemary, and parsley, 2 huge baskets of tomatoes, and 5 huge peppers. then i chopped. and I chopped until about 2pm--finally threw it all into a pot and cooked it for a few hours: my own pasta sauce.

today I also finished my second round of ketchup (this time out of tiny golden baby tomatoes which will make it extra sweet), and then went out to the fruit trees and picked armfuls of peaches and then off to the blackberry patch and got a jar of those too. chop chop and into the dish, made a crumble topping and now that's baking in the oven: peach-blackberry crumble. there are 2 new WWOOFers living here too. they're from Wisconsin and a brother a sister. it's great. really nice to have new faces around. and they're loads of fun.

at some point today we also went swimming in the pond out front. we had inner tube races backwards and forwards and every which way. spinning contests and the like.

we've just finished cleaning the kitchen after this massive day of cooking, we're listening to bob dylan, and kiri (the girl) and i are about to do some yoga in the big open main room.

tomorrow we three (ben, kiri, and i) will go to a nearby farm and help there with some potato digging. also i suspect that tomorrow will consist of lots of tomato sauce eating and there's a whole pie to consume as well. lots of cooking comes with lots of eating!


like i said: i am so lucky to have the luxury of time to be doing this. how did i get here? how am i allowed to be doing this? it is so luxurious and relaxing. so time-loving. i mean by that: time is elongated for me here. and nothing is stressful or unpleasant. things just happen. i could live here for a while---probably later in life is better. right now, i can tell that i would feel cooped up quite quickly. i do need a bit more adventures in my life. a few more 5am nights out doing crazy things. but it's incredible to be able to have this taste of it now. and to have the ability to just relax into it. to soak it in.

the buckners are incredible people. so warm and generous. they just open their arms to me and say: COME enjoy this life that we have. work along side us and make and eat and enjoy our food. help us and we will give you a warm home to live in and a beautiful place to explore. i cannot think of a more perfect WWOOF situation in so so many ways.

i am now sitting on my bed with pepper, one of the kitties, purring next to me and she is rubbing her face up to mine, itching to be pet. so i will stop typing. and pet her.

that's about how life is here. and i think it's how life should be. we should be able to just stop and pet the kittens.

WWOOF

well, world....I am embarking on a new writing adventure as I am also embarked on this new life adventure. I'm currently living in Redwood Valley, CA about 2 hours north of San Fran with the amazing Buckner family. I am WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) which means that I am working in their garden, on their ranch and in their vineyards in exchange for $0.00 and a room and delicious food and a warm family and community to hang out with.

This means i am pretty much on my own in a lot of respects. I am here exploring the California wine world--to see if wine is something that I could use in life. as in a career of sorts. I am here to explore what a new part of the country feels like--a part of the country that nearly everyone tells me I really belong to. I am also here because when else am I going to be able to take 4 months (or however long this adventure lasts) to do nothing but live in a new place, meet new people who are interesting and friendly, and take some time to think about what I really want to be doing with "LIFE." Yea right.

So I am here and if this all turns out to be a flopp--that is, wine isn't for me for a career--then no big deal because MAN this place is gorgeous and these people are fun and I'm having a blast.

So what else is happening in this place? Let's see: After Gen and I had our oil spill of 2009 (Joey I'm sorry), we stayed at Le Vin winery and vineyard in Cloverdale CA with Eric and Holly Le Vin. That WWOOFing experience was...unexpected. Read sophieandgengowest.blogspot.com to get Gen's concise and wonderfully written review of our time there. For here I'll leave it at this: the place has no beds for the 10 WWOOFers who live there. And there's really not much in terms of order. Rattlesnakes abound, and there's a fair amount of swearing, but lots of music jamming. It was just too crowded for me and to be honest, not what I really had in mind nor what I really want to spend my time on during this adventure in CA.

So, Gen dropped me off at the Buckners and I have been here since Thursday. I have my own beautiful room, I have my guitar, miles to go running on, porches for yoga in the shade of table grapes, delicious food, an incredible veggie garden which is my job to weed and tend to, tons of produce which we harvest and turn into ketchsup (SO sO SO good) and relish. I now know how to can properly in the old fashioned way using boiling water and old Bally jars. There are 3 dogs and 3 cats, Tim & Laura and their son Andrew live here. They turned out to be a Waldorf family. Also my dear friend Tammy from Boston is WWOOFing with a family just down the road. We had a playdate together yesterday and our families had dinner together tonight.

last night we had dinner at my house, then laura took us to local guy's backyard which he has set up like a drive in movie. each weekend he plays a different movie and people come and sit on lawn chairs and watch once the sun goes down. he even has a popcorn making machine which you pay $0.25 for a bag. =) so we watched Mr. Goose something with Cary Grant under the California stars (you can really see the Milky way out here) and had cuddly blankets and popcorn.

Today I helped make relish and can it. so fun. can't really describe how fun and rewarding it feels to pick the veggies, cut them, cook them, then can them and boil them sealed shut, and now they are preserved for as long as they want and the Buckners will eat that relish over the course of the next year. We did that with ketchup also. (which you can also spell "catsup, did you know??) and we had some of it at dinner tonight. WOAH yum yum. like YUMMM.

What do I do? Well. I wake up and go running through the grape vineyards. Then I do some yoga under the grape canopy on the porch. Then I go and pick some fresh blueberries and strawberries and eat them with my granola. Then I help in the house--either canning or making some new concoction--or I help Tim with the vineyard work, or do some weeding in the garden, or eventually I think I might do some ranch work (like shoveling and that kind of thing). Basically I am here to do whatever the family needs me to do, and Tim knows that I am interested in wine and learning about organic grape growing so he is going to let me do as much of my work in the vineyard stuff as I can. Which is awesome. My days are work in the early mornings before it gets hot (doing vineyard work, or ranch or gardening stuff) and quit by 1pm i think, then in the afternoon I am pretty much free, though I then help out with dinner and any house stuff that needs to get done. That's what I'm assuming at least--I have yet to really have to work all that much, mostly it's been pretty sporadic and all over the place, and honestly I really don't feel like I'm working enough for how well I'm eating and sleeping. but I have a feeling once the week starts tomorrow they are definitely going to put me to work and I'll be singing a different tune....

I really love it here. I hope to stay here for a few weeks or even a month, then head up to Oregon and see what I can fine there! possibly even invade gen's new life.

so that's sort of the update. bed now. wake up at 6am tomorrow for vineyard work!

final

*frankfurt airport, business class lounge. some time on may 8th, as i wait to take my second leg home from India*


The moon refused to chase me yesterday.
I craned to watch out my window
expecting to see it speed just behind the bus--
but the grin of that Cheshire only laughed.
And far above,
distorted and giant,
an eye winked
(a star shimmered)
and the entire sky became one face.

Tears overflow my eyes
and drip
fall
spill.

"Stop. Don't race ahead. It is still real right now."

Laugh, out loud,
and a smile cracks my freckled face--
but I can feel myself crumbling
beneath the weight of this proximity.
Will I remember the child brown and shoeless
wading through garbage and shit,
hoisting her sister on her own three year old hip?

I am a sieve.
And I am filtering--
against my will, the course from the fine--
images of the land of color and filth.
As one, it pumps as a single unit:
simultaneously the peak
and the plunge of human existence.

Should it remain fully tainted?

There is dirt in the pours of my feet,
spotting my toes
like the negative of lice on a bald black head.
Dirt in the cracks of my toenails:
scratch behind my ear and my fingers turn black.
Like ants
in my breakfast,
beads of grime roll and scamper down
my arms and legs
spill out of my navel
cascade down my face.
Pool at my elbows and knees,
collect into a river of grime and then
spills over--
rushes with white churning energy
down
down
out
and down.

Each hair stands on end
each one a vessel
for my human aqueduct to carry what memories
I have into and out of the vault of my brain.

Hair toes fingers are the deltas
from which ants dirt lizards grit
cloth color powder
plastic shit bottles
shoot in one hundred
separate
directions each landing in a place
I could call home.

My body sweats these creatures and filth
as it sifts through what has been real.
No longer absorbing dirt
I now extract an essence not my own--
or newly my own:
as such profoundly disturbing.

Crane around a brown neck to see
the familiar face of the sky--
but the moon would not run.

So what could I do but leave her behind?

I will try to move beyond the shock of these new nuances;
only, I can't find the door towards home.
Even as 1 billion heads nod
'yes, straight and over left (or right),'
no one can tell me where the best part of me landed
on that day 24 lifetimes ago
(or 5 months in my history)
when the grit ants shot from my toes.