I had originally thought of filling you in on the serendipitous revelations I encountered while drinking my way through
summer vacation this August, but there's a story imminently more interesting, I think, and timely as well. Even though I no longer
make wine professionally, the old saying still holds that once you work with grapevines your life is forever tangled in their their
tendrils. And so it is this August day, as I sit in the Long Island wine country, reminded of the busy and anxious life a winemaker
leads at this time of year. The harvest is imminent, or all ready begun if you're a sparkling wine maker, and while cityites and
suburbanites are basking in the final glorious moments of holiday before Labor Day returns with it's call to Fall projects like
school for children, picking up the pace at work and planning for the holidays ahead. The winemaker, on the other hand, is
marshaling his crews to finish off the work from last year's harvest while keeping a watchful eye on the one approaching. You
see, inside the winery, the white wines from last year need to be bottled and the red wines which need extra aging must get into
small barrels or tanks. And the red wines from the previous harvest, two vintages ago, are now ready for the bottle and must
come out of their barrels and tanks and be prepared for the bottling line, which makes room for the aforementioned red wine
from last year's harvest to go into barrel.
As barrels and tanks cost lots of money you have just the minimum number that you need, so one thing has to go somewhere
before something else can take its place. This is the "dance" or merry-go-round that winemakers orchestrate inside the walls of
their wine cellars, always working towards the end game of having enough empty fermenter tanks to allow them to crush the
new harvest. "To everything there is a season", and a turning, no?
I founded Artisan Wines in 1984, and soon brought in well-known designer Jeffrey Caldewey to create its distinctive
marketing image. In addition to producing and marketing Napa Valley wines under its own label, the firm created and marketed
two negociant brands, and a line of French wines made for the American market. Production of all brands reached 12,000
cases and selected national distribution.
The harvest is almost upon us now and the month of August is our last chance to get everything ready before the deluge of tons
of ripe and ready (hopefully!) grapes come cascading into the crushing station. This is one of the joys of being a winemaker.
Not unlike a sailor tacking with the wind, one is cheek and jowl with the "force of nature", the inevitable rythmn of the seasons.
The nature of your work, in this moment, is dictated not by a clock or a manager but the heat of the day, the unfortunate
rainstorm, the cycle of ripening fruit on the vine, how long the morning fog takes to recede, the difference in the composition of
the soil the grapevines grow in. You can and you must give yourself up to the imperative of getting those grapes off the vine at
the optimum ripeness and crushed safely into your fermenters, where the yeast can work their magic of changing sugar water
into something much more stable, wine.
While the cellar crew (cellar rats is the proud moniker they acquire) is busy filtering and pumping and bottling, the winemaker is
collecting grape samples from the vineyard to get a reading which tells him (or her) what is the average ripeness of the vineyard.
This is accomplished by walking through the vineyard with a little pail or plastic bag and randomly picking a single grape from a
cluster on one vine and another from another vine a little further down the row until you've walked up and down many rows
across the entire vineyard getting a berry here and a berry there. Then you take them back to your winemaker laboratory and,
by crushing and mixing them all up together, you end up with a cup of juice that represents the average ripeness of the whole
vineyard. It could be one acre or 40 acres, depending on the size of the vineyard, but by doing this "sampling" you know how
ripe your grapes are getting. As they become riper and closer and closer to the sugar level you want to pick them at, you make
your walk through the vineyard every other day instead of once a week.
Now, inside the winery, the bottling is done and the cellar crew has time to clean up the crusher, a machine designed to separate
the grape berries from the stalk and break the berry open in the process; the press, which you use to separate the grape juice
from the grape skins, and all the hoses and pumps and picking boxes and gondolas which haven't been used since last year's
harvest.
Your winemaker is also busy making arrangements to hire a picking crew and probably a few more cellar rats to work during
the crush. This is the time of year that requires extra hands. Soon, all will be swamped with big 5 ton gondolas of ripe grapes
that need to be tested for sugar and weighed; then crushed, with the skin and juice being separated immediately for white
grapes, while the red grapes are pumped, skin and juice together, into a fermenting tank to begin the fermentation that will
extract all the color locked in the grape skins, leaving the grape's color in the finished wine.
Come back next article when we'll begin harvesting, then checking out the action at the winery with the first load of grapes
pulling into the winery.
