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Bonus Material - Harvest Diary
Day 16. Tuesday October 3. The day started with an e-mail from my mother. She is very proud and enamored with my adventures. So much so that she stated, in one line left between two short paragraphs, I'm glad I had you. Sorry, Mom, but I didn't think there was any doubt. I feel loved. Comforted. Confused. I console myself with work. Work. With 17 tanks of Pinot Noir filled to the brim, over 90 tons of fruit. Daily cellar work calls for routine maintenance of each tank - two, three times a day. When we finished the early afternoon schedule it was time for the evening events to unfold. Pumping, pushing, over and down. With all this red fruit and the maintenance and care, I wonder, does white wine make itself. Chardonnay arrives; we crush it in a big cylinder with an inflatable, rubber bag. The juice drips out of a rotating sleeve and the wine goes to tank and then to barrel. We sit and wait - watching it bubble over, pushing bungs from the barrel and oozing the foam of fermentation. Daydreaming. A break from cellar work. We harvested Pinot in the morning. Returned to the winery. We did wine work. The fruit arrived. We stood at the sorting table with six or seven, god knows who can remember, tons of prime Pinot from our prized 'Widdoes' vineyard in Green Valley. Sorting for fruit that isn't ripe, over ripe, sun burnt to a crisp and any random leaves and stems. The grapes were thick skinned today. Plump and bursting inside out. They were sweet, but not to a sickening fault and they had the bright acidity that causes a winemaker to smile and say this is going to be legendary. I smiled to myself and my eyes starting playing tricks on me. The grapes came across the table, at the end of the line very alien. The skins were gone. All that was left was a green pulpy mass that looked like tight, brown eyes floating in a globular membrane. I shook my head to get my own globes back in orbit. Day 17. Wednesday October 4. White rimmed gray clouds. This ain't no battleship gray. Kind of the whitish gray on an old fisherman's beard. It rained today. A little. But it hasn't rained since April. And we are expecting a couple more days of the sprinkle. Irrigators on the vineyard are turned off and soils with good drainage will be good for the grapes. A little rain is good my winemaker says. Rain two or three weeks ago would have been bad. As for us, and most, our glass is half full. We have about half of our grapes remaining to harvest. A little Pinot, about 20 tons or 1,200 cases or so of wine, a bulk of Chardonnay and all our Syrah. We'll start harvesting some Syrah this weekend. Or maybe not. Day 18. Thursday October 5.
Big drama around the tank room. Yesterday afternoon, I forgot to report. Our girl from Uruguay (Southern South America, squeezed between Brazil and Argentina, next to Paraguay (not Parador - in Spain - where the "Moon" is "Over" for Richard Dreyfuss fans). Well, our girl fell from the bottom rung of the ladder and sprained her ankle. And our guy from South Africa (Stellenbosch where they make nothing but Chenin Blanc and blend some Pinot Noir with an indigenous grape of ill repute), got hit by another ladder on the back of the neck just a few days ago and is having post-traumatic numbing migraines. But note, no wine was hurt during either of the incidents.
Post - October'06 Back to home...
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