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"I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot."
The weekend has come and gone and with it, the growing season for Larkmead Merlot. On Saturday, I worked (after having Friday off). We harvested 10 tons of Merlot at Larkmead Estate and Vineyards (in Napa). Ten tons of grapes equates to about 580 cases (or 6,960 bottles of wine). From grape to glass, we lose a little more than 40% of the total weight when we de-stem the berries, press the skins and pips (seeds) and create the final product. The Mexican, harvest men started about 6:30 in the morning and it was damn cold. Registering about 41 degrees. If we would have known the temperature at this hour, we probably would have waited to a little later in the morning (say 9:30 after a bacon, egg and cheese and coffee) because the fruit was freezing. However, this is a good thing because the cold temps allow the fruit to maintain its integrity, but bad because temperature controls the fermentation process and with cold fruit, it will take a few days before it heats up and begins fermentation without an inoculating kick-start from the winemaking team. Details about this to follow in the weeks to come. Back to the men. In Sicily, it was a 'whistle while you work' kind of harvest atmosphere. You work until the scheduled amount of fruit is off the vines - typically a 10-hour day. You get paid for the day. Here in California, the men are paid by the amount of bins they load on to the tractor. It is an amazing race. Each man has a numbered, rectangular bucket and runs down the line, sliding under a vine like a good ol' baseballer, cuts the fruit, fills the bucket, lifts it atop their heads, screams something in Spanish and dumps it into a larger bin attached to the back of a tractor. They return to work in a flash. When they dump the fruit, I questioned later, they call out their bucket number and a foreman records their tally. Some teams will work such that - as a team tallying all the buckets and dividing the vineyards total amongst them. But these 10 men were working on an individual productivity scale. And they finished 2.5 acres in about three hours. That is each man moving about 1,000 pounds of grapes throughout the morning. But their day was not done. They moved on to another vineyard (not ours). On a busy day, each man will take about 300 buckets to the tractor. Each bucket weighs about 30 lbs. To put it into perspective, each man, each day, was doing the job of two men in Sicily. The Grape Gods in California love illegal immigrants. My job on this day was to sort the fruit (and to look for a cell phone that seemed to escape a pocket and full into the fruit). We created an assembly line around a 'U' shaped mass of stainless steel machines. The bins were lifted by a forklift and torqued slowly to dump the fruit on one end of a metal, vibrating table, no different than your flashback vibrating football game, and bunches bounced the fruit down the line as we snagged the undesirables (those clusters with shriveled, raisin like grapes) and pulled out leaves that were stuck between bunches like a blanket between your legs while you are sleeping. My (clean) hands touched almost every bunch of grapes that will be made into Miles least favorite alcoholic beverage. From there, an angled, rubber stepladder moved the fruit to a de-stemmer (a large rotating screw-like device with paddles made of rubber) that disengages the grapes from their perch and drops those unwanted stems into another bucket. The berries are released like marbles in red-wine water and herded into rows down a path, into a tube and into a tank. Where they will sit, cold soak, until fermentation begins. Day one is done, but there are many more to come. However, I don't think that I will work much more at Larkmead because they are about half the size (7,000 cases) of the winery that I am working at in Sonoma (14,000 cases) and this week DuMOL (Sonoma) will commence harvesting its first fruit. We are tentatively scheduled to pick Pinot Noir on Tuesday (6 tons). Chardonnay on Thursday and Friday (8 tons) and and Viognier on Saturday (3 tons). DuMOL will harvest roughly 245 total tons this year. It looks like we will pick fruit through the first two weeks of November. However, once the fruit is off the vine, it takes days/weeks for fermentation to go through the full cycle, so 'harvest' probably won't end until early December. This is a slow start because of the up and down weather Sonoma has had this year (rainy Spring, heat wave Summer, Fall-like current temps). To put it in perspective, the Pinot fruit we will pick first was harvested one month earlier in 2004. But 2004 was an early year, or so they say. For all intents and purposes and calendar math, we are about two weeks behind schedule with about 40 to 50 more individual 'harvests' to go. And why do we have so many harvests and why does it last so long? Because my winemaker makes 50 different wines. Each vineyard, each block of grapes within the vineyard, will be picked when he believes they are ready - that means that they need to have the appropriate chemistry make up (i.e. sugar and PH/acidity levels) and they must pass the all important taste test. A good winemaker who happens to be a good viticulture guy (i.e. an expert in grape growing) will be able to tell what kind of wine he will make in any given year by the way he tastes the grapes on the vine. "Four out of five Doctors" of wine, I assume will be spot on. So, to prove his taste buds right, my guy will make individual wines based on their quality and he/we will blend them into the final product(s) accordingly. This is the fun and most important part because each grape from each vineyard site will have its own unique characteristics (based on soil, the amount of sun and water the grapes get throughout the year and which variation of the grape is being grown). From some vineyards, we will make an a.m. and a p.m. wine - that is wine from the side of the vine that receives morning sun and a wine from the side of the vine that receives afternoon sun. To Ernest and Julio Gallo and countless others, this is overkill. To a genius with the grape juice, this is obligatory. Pinot Noir, for example, has a number of different 'clones' that have a number of different qualities. Each, when blended, will add to the complexity (the color, the aroma, the taste and the texture) of the wine; so, predicting the potential 'ripeness' is crucial. As stated, in the end, we will make 50 wines, but will blend them to produce 12 different bottles of wine - 4 Pinot Noirs, 4 Chardonnays, 3 Syrahs and 1 Viognier. Sadly, these wines will not be available to the consuming public until 2008, and the waitlist for DuMOL wines is longer than that of the Soho House. [Ed. Note: Said cell phone was found in Bin 17. It still worked.]
Post - September'06 Back to home...
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