Fall 2011 Vineyard News

Harvest is underway, kinda…
It is mid-October as I write this quarter’s newsletter, and I’m wondering if it is all going to happen. Usually the column for this newsletter is one of the hardest to get done. It is due to the fact that I am juggling ten things at once, trucking to and from, arranging picks, sampling, processing, pressschedules, rehydrating barrels, barrel downs, tank roulette, additions, subtractions, lab work, bedtime stories, and then all the normal things that have to get done around here. I love it, really! There must be some sort of energy that I tap into for harvest. It could be like the nesting phenomenon mothers feel not too long before giving birth, I’m harvenesting!
I get the feeling a lot of people might not understand what “harvest” really means. You go out to the vineyard and pick your grapes right? Squeezey sqeezey how hard could it be? Well, not all grapes get ripe at the same time. You need to sample and test them. There is deliberation man! Some varieties are early ripening, like September; others don’t reach maturity until October, November. The hard part comes in that most grapes are picked by hand and this takes time. In a best case scenario, grapes are picked early. We start at sunrise and finish by noon or one-o-clock. The grapes are then transported to the winery. By now it’s maybe two or three in the afternoon. We can’t just put a few tons of fruit in the fridge until we are ready, we need to get them processed before they start to ferment or rot or both. Technically fermenting is rotting, but you get it. We process the fruit into fermenters, clean up and then tend to what has come in previously. Get some sleep and do it again the next day and every day for the next three or so months.
“Normally”we will start to get some fruit into the winery by the first week in September, maybe even earlier, but that can be a different kind of weird. That can be more of a motivational problem. For Example I might react more like the following: What, somebody thinks there grapes are ready?! Cheese and rice, it’s only August why are we being punished, we aren’t ready, it’s not fair! Winemakers are really good at throwing fits. “Normally” whites will get ripe first, kind of like a warm up; sticky, bee-infested Viognier, maybe a little Grenache Blanc to get us going, blow out the cobwebs, and allow us to remember some of those muscles we forgot. Some early reds might trickle in, ton here, ton there, no big whoop. Gradually ever so slightly, before we really comprehend what has happened, fruit is flying at us from all directions. Fruit flies are attacking, yellow jackets are attacking, we run out of beer, somebody cries, and we forget we once had friends and that not all meals are eaten from greasy bags with our fingers.
Not this year, this year it’s different, not much going on so we have been thumb wrestling, chain saw juggling, and at one point had a domino maze so fantastically huge it was starting to interfere with our mid- morning pallet jack races. The weather has been cool, not Fonzi cool, cool as in not hot, not , not hot as in ugly, just not very warm in temperature, and we experienced some early season rain, which slows everything down to a crawl. We are waiting, trying to keep busy, and getting slightly nervous. What we are most worried about, I guess, is how we are going to squeeze all of the work we usually squeeze frantically into three months, into three weeks! November is usually the end of the line for vines: rain, frost, dormancy, that kind of thing. I am thinking it is going to be interesting to say the least. I imagine it will be demanding for the next few weeks, and if weather permits, will drag into November, possibly December. So I guess maybe it could be less of a squeezing and more of a dragging that occurs. We may still get our recommended yearly allowance of approximately three or so months of harvest fun times.

-eo

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