The Next Phase

Finally we are done sorting grapes!!!! Staring at the sorting conveyor for hours upon hours was beginning to kill me. We had a really long five-day stretch where we received and processed almost all of the remaining grapes (about 80 tons), which made for an exhausting ten-day period which culminated in me running out of gas on my way home from a 13-hour day because I had been too lazy to get up five minutes earlier and drive out of my way to the gas station. Lesson learned.

Our last grapes - I couldn't be more thrilled

I am the early intern, so I go in at 8:00 every morning to collect samples and analyze each fermenter so that adds can be made before the others roll in at 9:30 and punch down. Punching down serves basically to re-wet the skins which all float to the top in order to prevent them from collecting any unwanted bacteria. It also stirs in the additions that we make, most of which serve to guide the yeast in the direction we want it to go. When I collect samples, they want them to come from beneath the cap because the temperature and sugar levels are more accurate, but that means sticking my entire arm into bins upon bins full of grapes at 8:00 in the morning when it's 40 degrees. By the time I'm done, it looks not unlike I've just birthed a cow.

The ferment room/cellar. Because there are so many
fermentations going on, the room fills with CO2 pretty
quickly and can actually be pretty dangerous.

After the yeast has done its job of converting sugars into alcohol, the wine is separated from the grapes in the press and the bins are set aside to let sediments settle, after which the wine is pumped off of the sediment and stored for over a year for aging.

My samples - drinking wine like it's my job

Among all of this, the cellar has gotten more and more crowded (we're producing almost three times the amount of wine their facility is made for), and we've gained more and more inside jokes. My nicknames have somehow (and somewhat unfortunately) become either Munch - short for Munchkin - or Musty Thigh - which evolved from my My Little Pony whose name was Misty Fly. We recently had a new addition to our team, Pamela, who works at Nike during the week, but is a wine blogger and wanted to get a real experience working a harvest, so she boldly signed up to spend four of her weekends working with us. It's funny how you don't realize how many inside jokes you have until you have to explain them to someone new. We also have a 3:00 dance party, which I take credit for initiating during the first week of harvest. It's not always at 3:00, especially when we were processing because we often didn't have lunch until 3:00 (one day it was at 5:00), but it happens and it's glorious.

My boss Sam dance-partying

Mikey went so far as to make a
poster of me

This week was Canadian Thanksgiving, and considering that my two roommates are Canadian, one of them cooked up a turkey feast on her day off and invited some friends and told everyone to dress Canadian. While most of the attendees wore flannel and denim, my boss Sam dressed as Avril Lavigne (sporting eyeliner for the first time in her life) - and she convinced me to dress as Celine Dion. I was kind of bummed that I hadn't planned ahead more and acquired a ballgown, but I made up for it with insane amounts of bronzer and an entrance that involved me singing the Titanic theme song into my hairbrush microphone. 

Our harvest team (minus Tony)

All things considered, this is a very weird experience time-wise. It flies by, especially the way that our harvest has gone. But because I live and work with the same five people and they're the only people I see, I feel like I've known them for years. Recent talk of ending the harvest has changed the vibe a little, and I have to admit that I'm happy to be moving on, but I'm sad that it's already taking some of the fun out of our day-to-day life.

After all of the dreadful rain, I can't express how nice it is to
a) get a day off, b) see the sun again, and c) find some of
the pretty places around here. This is at Champoeg State
Park along the Willamette River. 

The Vineyard Receival Process in Pictures

Step 1: Grapes are brought up to the semi-outside sorting line in bins straight from the vineyard. 

 

 

 

Step 2: The bins are loaded individually and dumped onto the sorting line, where we sort them by hand as they move along a conveyor belt.

 

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 3: The conveyor belt goes through a second-story door and dumps the grapes into a destemmer which, as its name suggests, separates the grapes from the stems and dumps the grapes into plastic fermenter bins or a giant gravy boat. (That's actually the term they use)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 4: For white wines, the grapes go into a the gravy boat and are immediately pressed for juice. For red wines, the grapes are stored away in their fermenter bins to gain color and ferment before they are pressed off of the grape skins.

 

 

 

Step 5: We clean up in a three hour process that never fails to soak me head to toe, though I'd say that's my due to my own inadequacies at operating our leaky hose and/or my desire to do things as quickly as possible even if it means getting a lot of grape seeds in my hair. On the big pinot days, it looks like a massacre occurred on the sorting line. Also, our drain system leaves much to be desired, resulting in a fairly smelly cesspool situation to which we really have no solution. 

 

 

 

Step 6: Go home and shower. Then repeat.

Atmospheric Rivers

The term that they're using for the weather that we're experiencing right now is "atmospheric river." It's been an absolute deluge for the last four days, which it turns out isn't the greatest for wine production for several reasons:
a) it dilutes the sugars in the grapes because the vines absorb more water, diminishing flavors
b) it damages the grapes by breaking the skins, which lowers yields
c) pickers don't like to work in the rain (some of ours walked off in the middle of a pick the other day)
d) trucks often can't drive in the vineyards when they're muddy
e) we can't process wet grapes because water gets into the fermentation bins and dilutes the juice/wine
f) our crush pad is outside - it's covered, but cold

At this point, the rain has essentially ruined the harvest and one of the most common phrases going around these days is "worst harvest ever." Sweet. My first harvest happens to be the worst harvest ever in this region. They seem to be sort of in denial about Oregon being a rainy place. I guess you'd kind of have to if you were relying on a dry September for your income.

Nonetheless, Saturday they decided to pick anyway for White Pinot Noir, which is sort of like a Rosé. The process of making it is already a nightmare, and the added benefit of wet grapes made yesterday an extra special one. There's a bit of a back story with the white pinot and Tony Rynders. He was the head winemaker at Domaine Serene for ten years, which is where he earned most of his accolades, including creating a Domaine Serene White Pinot called the Coeur Blanc, which they still sell for $85 a bottle. In 2008, he was fired, and then the owners of Domaine Serene sued him for the intellectual property rights to making his white pinot. No money exchanged hands in the end, but he was prohibited from making white pinot for three years, making this year his first opportunity to do so. He didn't necessarily want to, but he and Sam, who worked under him there, are still so bitter about the lawsuit that they are making it just to spite "Ken & Grace" as they call them.

The process was unbelievably laborious and ridiculous. They had the grapes picked into slotted 1/4 ton bins (normally they're 1/2 ton) so that they would dry off more quickly, and once they arrived, we laid them out on the winery floor and fanned them and then shook them off individually with the forklift. It was a long day.

My role has changed recently as well as fermentations have progressed, and I now come in early to test the sugar and acid levels of each bin so that adjustments may be made before they get punched down in the morning. "Punching down" essentially means rewetting all of the grape skins which float to the top and create a cap that can turn into vinegar and ruin the flavor if not consistently dealt with (as in twice a day). Let's just say that doing punchdowns on twenty to thirty bins twice a day makes visiting the gym unnecessary.

With the wines in such different stages, however, our work has become much more time intensive, especially as we begin to receive grapes again, which should be happening tomorrow. Now we not only have to process and sort the incoming grapes, but we also have to care for the ones we already have and actually start pressing them off the skins, which is the third large step of the process. Because there has been so much rain, the skins on the grapes in the vineyards are very weak and rot and mold are very very likely, so they are planning to bring in the remaining 50 tons of grapes that we're expecting within the next four days assuming it's dry enough to do so. Already the rain looks like it might return, so who knows when exactly crunch time will be, but it's possible that today was my last day off for several weeks. Don't worry - I ate enough to last me through at least the next few days.