Barreled down

Barreled down is winery speak for having all of your fermented wine pressed and put into barrel. We did this on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.

Before pressing, we clean the barrels, which really is where all of the work is. They must be scrubbed, rinsed, sulphured, ozoned, rinsed again, and drained. Each barrel weighs about 100 pounds, and they sit on racks of two, and everything gets moved, lifted, and racked by hand. We pressed 32 barrels of wine, and I prepped 14 on Tuesday and 18 on Wednesday. I'm glad that's over with.

Before pressing, we stick what amounts to a large stainless steel straw (like you drink a soda from at McDonald's) into the fermenter and suck the "free run" wine out and pump it into the barrels. The pump does all of the work, all we do is move the hoses around. The pressing process itself is fairly simple - dump the fermenter into the press with the forklift/bin dumper, and let the press do its thing. The tough part is preparing all of the barrels.

All of the estate Pinot Noir is now done, and about two-thirds of the vineyard is picked out. We still have to do Chardonnay, but making white wine is is much simpler and easier than making red, so it's all downhill from here.

I'm now in San Francisco looking for a place, eating, and drinking heavily. I like it here, a lot. The only thing that is not to like are the rents - which are very high. Still, I think it's the place for me, at least for now.

Cheers!

"I drink too much. The last time I gave a urine sample it had an olive in it." - Rodney Dangerfield

Mucho trabajo

That's Spanish for "lots of work", which sums up the past couple of weeks. A typical day begins at 5:30 AM, with punchdowns at the winery. It's a solid hour of physical work, and good exercise too. I will be glad when we press the Pinot Noir (later this week) as pressing means the end of punchdowns. After I return from the winery, I usually join the harvest crew until the pick is done, which can be as early as 8:00 AM or as late as noon. If we do a pick for the "estate" wine we return to the winery to crush the fruit and do the afternoon punchdown. If the pick is for one of the other producers the early afternoon is free and I head to the winery in the late afternoon for the punchdown. Fortunately, the winery staff has been doing the evening punchdown so my day is usually done by 5:00 PM.

It is very interesting how the wine industry runs on Mexican labor for almost all of the harvest/farm labor and perhaps half of the winery labor, and most Mexicans don't drink wine at all. Most of them probably think we (Whiteys) are idiots for spending so much time, energy, and money on fermented grape juice.

The Mexican workers listen to a funky form of music called "bomba" which sounds like a crazy polka, in Spanish. The two radio stations most listened to are "La Preciosa" and "La Buena", and it seems like they are always on in both the vineyard and the winery. It is pretty cool stuff, and really sets the mood. California wine is dependent on Mexican labor, and we need to salute them!

It looks like we will be pressing the Pinot Noir in less than a week, as well as harvesting and pressing the Chardonnay. Chardonnay is pressed immediately after harvest and ferments in barrel, so there are no punchdowns. This means that we will have a day or two of barrel preparation in the early part of the upcoming week, and after pressing (Thursday???) I will be basically done here. There is a lot of fruit still hanging in the vineyard, but the picks will accelerate over the next week and it will disappear quickly.

It's been fun, and there is still a bit more to do, but the finish line is now in sight.

Harvest has begun!

On Sunday, September 24, we began harvesting Pinot Noir. We were up and in the fields at 5:30 AM, which turned out to be just a touch too early, as it was still too dark to see the fruit. We were picking Pinot Noir, clone 667. For more info on Pinot Noir, go here: http://www.winepros.org/wine101/grape_profiles/pinot.htm

The process goes as follows. First, position the picking bins on the trailer behind the tractor. The picking bins' dimensions are 4' x 4' x 2' (W x D x H), and they are made of food grade plastic. Drive the tractor down a row of vines, with the crew following. The picking crew fill 5 gallon plastic buckets with freshly picked clusters, and runners empty these buckets into the picking bins. One or two people sort fruit as it is placed in to the picking bin, throwing out underripe fruit, leaves, and other MOG (Material Other than Grapes). When both picking bins are full, the tractor heads back to the barn for a fresh set of bins. The full bins are kept in the shade until all of the days' fruit is harvested and we are ready to go to the winery.

The bins are then loaded via forklift onto a flatbed truck, and are strapped down securely. Each bin holds roughly 900 pounds of fruit, and at premium Pinot Noir prices, each holds several thousand dollars worth of fruit. Care is taken to ensure the cargo reaches its destination.
At the winery, the fruit is unloaded with another forklift, weighed, and stacked up to be crushed. A forklift with a bin dumper is used to dump the fruit into a vibrating hopper, which feeds a conveyor belt/incline ramp that is called a sorting table. The fruit is sorted a second time by hand on the sorting table and is fed by the conveyor belt into a destemmer/crusher, which not surprisingly destems and crushes the fruit. The crushed berries are now a mash of juice, skins, and seeds, which together are called "must", which falls from the destemmer/crusher into a fermenter. The fermenter is similar to the picking bin, but twice as tall. The stems fall out of a chute on the destemmer into a empty picking bin.

A small amount of sulphur dioxide is added to the crushed fruit to prevent spoilage and spontaneous fermentation, and a generous amount of dry ice is added to keep the temperature down. The dry ice creates a very cool "Land of the Lost" style fog effect. The must will sit in the fermenter and be stirred twice a day for a few days before the fermentation process starts. This pre-fermentation rest is called a cold soak and really helps to extract flavors from the skins. The stirring process, called a "punch down" is accomplished by placing a board across the top of the fermenter, climbing up, and using a large tool similar to a giant potato masher to knock the skins back down into the juice.

I then cleaned two more fermenters for today (Monday) and we cleaned the sorting table and floor, as grape remains are everywhere. We then loaded up the empty picking bins and headed back to the farm for a well deserved shower, dinner, and night of sleep.

We did another small harvest/crush today, but it was small enough that Wes and I had plenty of time to play golf this afternoon. It's a rough life.

There are more pictures of all of this here: http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/weber12398/album?.dir=3b6fscd

Cheers!

Almost there...

Each Monday or Tuesday for the last few weeks I have been doing field sampling: picking grape samples and testing sugar and acid levels. Each week the fruit ripens a bit, and as it does, the sugar level rises. The warmer and sunnier it is, the faster fruit ripens, and Lompoc has been warm for the past few days.

To test the fruit, we pick a sample of roughly 10 pounds of grape clusters. This is collected in a 5 gallon plastic bucket. The fruit is crushed by hand and allowed to soak for about 15 minutes. Then, we strain off the skins, stems, and seeds and put the juice through 3 tests. First, a sample is poured into a graduated cylinder and the sugar level is measured with a hydrometer. This is basically as complicated as measuring the temperature with a thermometer. Second, a drop of juice is placed on the viewing window of a refractometer, which is used as a second measurement of sugar level. Typically, the readings from the refractometer and hydrometer are very close to each other. Finally, a pH meter is used to test the acidity of the juice sample. This is a digital instrument that we first calibrate, and then we simply place the probe from the meter into the juice sample and read the pH on the display.

Ripeness, as measured by sugar content, is the primary determinant of harvest date. Typically, Pinot Noir is harvested around 24.5 "degrees brix" (the scale used to measure sugar content in juice) and some of the vineyard is now up to 24 degrees brix, meaning harvest could start in as little as a few days. If the weather is as forecasted (mild/sunny), we will begin full-scale harvesting early next week. This is good news as I'm eager to get busy making wine!

For the last few weeks I have been doing occasional farming, pest control, and field sampling, but not much related to winemaking. I have been working out a lot at the gym and riding my mountain bike a lot, and watching a lot of football and movies (the Packers really suck). I'm also trying to plan my post-harvest trip to Europe, and I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to move next. San Francisco is a leading candidate.

I wish I had more exciting stories to tell, but life in wine country is pretty simple and slow...

Cheers!

Farming

I've kept quite busy lately but there are seemingly endless tasks to do on a farm. All of the wine is now in bottle, so there is nothing to do at the winery until we harvest, which should be in 2-3 weeks if the weather cooperates.

The grapes are beautiful and dark, and are tasting sweet now. The birds agree as they are eating everything they can get at. Obviously we would rather make wine than food for birds, so we do a number of things to keep the birds under control. First, we netted the entire vineyard about a month ago. This works pretty well but the birds will still try to get in through any openings or tears in the nets, and they will eat any fruit that is close enough to the nets to be pecked. To try and scare these birds away I have tied shiny mylar tape to the tops of the trellises. It blows and twinkles in the wind and seems to help. So far I have done the entire perimeter of the vineyard, plus along the road and a few passes through the blocks. I'll add more this coming week. We also broke out the shotgun this week to control the really determined birds.

In addition to birds, we have rodent pests: rabbits, ground squirrels, and gophers. Dogs help control these pests somewhat (Rosa caught me a rabbit yesterday), and shooting them with a .22 is fun and effective. There are natural predators helping us, including many birds of prey and bobcats. And Wes showed me how to bomb them in their holes by throwing what looks like a gigantic smoke bomb down the hole and then burying the entrance. I believe George W. Bush advocated using this technique a few years back in Afghanistan.

Yesterday I "suckered" one of the Chardonnay blocks, which means removing the "suckers". "Suckers" are where the vines' new growth shoots out from the trunk of the vine near the ground. We remove this to keep the growth at the top. I've also been hoeing weeds, and my body is aching from it, especially my forearms.

That's about it. I've been working out, riding my mountain bike, and hitting golf balls at the practice range down the road when time and fatigue permit, and watching preseason NFL games when I can. The Packers look like they are really going to suck this year...

Cheers!

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." - Ernest Hemingway

Busy week

This week has been pretty busy. I returned from Chicago on Sunday, and drove up to Lompoc on Monday.

Wednesday we went to the winery and did the 2005 pre-bottling work, which entailed racking 35 barrels of Pinot Noir to a 2000 gallon steel tank, and racking 3 barrels of Pinot Noir to a 300 gallon steel tank. After the wine was racked to the tanks, we pumped it though a gentle filter and into another set of tanks. This, plus all of the sanitation and barrel cleaning, made Wednesday a very busy day for all four of us.

Friday we went back to the winery to monitor the bottling. Bottling lines are very expensive and for a small winery it doesn't make sense to own the line - so we outsource it. We also pulled a small quantity of wine before bottling to put into 1/2 and double size bottles by hand. It turned in to a very long day.

This morning (Saturday) I got up relatively early and went into the vineyard for a morning of hoeing. Hoeing is simply using a hoe to pull weeds out from under the vines. Very simple, and very strenuous.

In between all of this I have been working on other software stuff, reading, mountain biking, and fishing. It's fun, but I'm tired.

The "fruits" of our labor

Things are going well in sunny Lompoc. Since my last post there hasn't been that much work; which should be interpreted as the "calm before the storm." On Friday I walked through the vineyards to observe the ripening. There is quite a bit of purple out there now, and the berries are starting to get a bit sweet.

Saturday the 12th was the second of two allocation BBQs, and it went without a hitch. Morten and friend Nadia (from Switzerland) flew up Saturday in Morten's plane for the event, and departed on Sunday. About an hour after I dropped them off at the Lompoc airport my friend Dmitriy came up with his girlfriend for some Santa Barbara county wine tasting. We hit a number of the local wineries, enjoyed a lot of good bread and cheese, and took in the countryside views. After a dinner at the Hitching Post, they returned to LA and I returned to taking it easy.

Monday and Tuesday have so far been pretty quiet. Yesterday I did some admin work and cleaned up the trailer a bit, and then we took a trip to the winery to top barrels. Today I'm spending time in the vineyards doing cluster counts for yield estimates. It's a lot of fun.

Tomorrow I'm off to Chicago for the rest of this week to see a Cubs game, eat, and enjoy a few tasty beverages. I'll be back on Monday. Cheers!

"Twas a woman who drove me to drink. I never had the courtesy to thank her." - W.C. Fields