Some of you know, I'm vacationing in Napa for the weekend, a chance to learn more about just what goes into making a bottle of wine. One of the vineyards we are members at was kind enough to let us hang out for their harvest this year, which is running about a month later then usual because of the weather.

So today the goal was simple. Bring in the Cabernet. The crew was going to pick it. We would crush it, and get it started in the tanks.

For those who don't know, Napa is expecting rain in the next few days, a bit unusual for October, which makes it more important to get the fruit in, because Mold may set on the grapes after it rains (depending on if it gets warm or not after).

The plan was something like this. Crew shows up early in the morning. Crew picks the 15 or so tons of grapes (about 30 of those big pallet sized bins you see as you go through the valley). We crush, and pump into tanks those grapes.

Plan worked pretty good until 11 or so. The crew was doing what they do, picking grapes (for which they make an incredibly small amount of money for, they are paid by the ton and it has to be split between them all after their foreman takes his cut), but for whatever reason they were tired and decided they were not going to work any longer. There was some soccer game on in the early afternoon, and it was thought they needed to go to watch it.

Ok, so that left rows of grapes on the vine, and as you know if you know anything about wine, the grapes are picked on their schedule, not yours.

So the scramble to assemble another crew starts, which is not easy given the number of wineries out picking this weekend. It's decided the family (family owned vineyard by the way) will hit the fields, including the 11 year old son, the 13 year old daughter, and my wife and I.

At the same time a crew of a half dozen people is assembled from where ever crews come from, and somebody goes to get some knives, since they don't have enough for everybody to pick.

We picked a couple thousand of pounds of grapes, cabernet to be exact. It's not hard work, but it was a cool day. Most times it's picked in the dark, but because of the low temperatures they were picking in the daytime. For every bin I filled up, one of the standard crew probably did two or three of them. Razor sharp knife, inability to really see under many of the vines, well let them work at full speed, I'll take my time. I like having ten fingers, thank you very much.

Once we get enough of a head start to start running the crusher, we head back and let the crew continue picking. The bins are weighed (because they are paid by the ton) and then loaded onto a device which flips to do a controlled empty into the destemmer and crusher. If you have never seen one of these machines, it's two feeds, on across the upper surface and another into the lower surface (think of it as a snowblower for grapes) where in the second stage the grapes are thrashed off the stems, and the grapes are passed down to a set of rollers that crush them, the stems expelled.

Bin after of bin of grapes (the cabernet we just picked) go through that, with the resulting skins, pulp, juice, and all that pumped into a tank. Weigh the bin full, put it on the feeder, feed it into the crusher, rake out any remaining grapes, remove the empty bin, wash the empty bin, feed all the grapes through, and repeat.

It is manual labor throughout, from the picking to the end. Even empty the bins weigh 96 pounds, so moving them around to take them from the feeder, or to wash them or load them back on the tractors to send out is not fun after the first few.

There are of course many more steps this cabernet will take on it's journey from field to bottle. It needs to be pumped over, rain or shine several times a day when the juice at the bottom of the tank is pumped over the skins and pulp at the top of the tank. It will eventually need to be moved to barrels and age, and will need to be bottled at some point, and probably held again.

The point is when this particular 2009 cabernet is released, I will know that I picked a good percentage of the grapes, I handled every batch of grapes that went into the tank, etc.

Oh, at the end of the day, the crew because it was smaller did not finish they had to come back tomorrow. All the equipment (the crusher, the bins, the hoses, etc) needed to be cleaned, or the juice would make for a sticky mess of yellow jackets out for their sugar high. Just to start it all over again in the morning.

Mike, sounds like a great vacation. when you finish that one, you can come visit me in DC on my hillside heritage garden that runs down to the river.

we will be putting in a couple of new terraces and hauling some 4-8 yards of "heritage" dirt down about 20 or 30 feet of hillside. need all the help we can get.

the main heritage crops are 20 kinds of tomatoes and 7 kinds of pole beans.

grow other "stuff", but not heritage.

Looking forward to tasting this (eventually).

dh

Thanks for sharing Mike, neat story! Harvest and the ensuing crush can be tons of fun (no pun intended!) but also pretty tiring if you're out there all day on a tight schedule. Vinification really gives us insight into what artists winemakers are. ^

Thanks, Mike. Over the weekend I was chatting with several winery owner/operators and for me, there are a few big issues with starting a winery and then producing.

The setup is one thing, but it's the setup for production is a whole other story, so the cost of making and cellaring the wine is the real cost of the business!

I look forward to reading more reports.

Wow, Mike. That sounds awesome!