Harvest is here!

The weather is cool, albeit yesterday was 90˚. The first trees are turning color. Apples are coming into season. I am wearing sweatshirts at night. It smells like concord. What do all of these things mean? Autumn is around the corner and the grapes are getting ready to be picked!

For those of us making a sparkling wine, grapes are already picked or will be so very soon. Where I am  currently working, Atwater Estate Vineyard, the Gewurztraminer grapes for a sparkling wine arrived Monday and the Chardonnay grapes on Tuesday. Nothing says "Good morning, sunshine!" like stomping, and at times jumping, on one ton of grapes.

We were whole-cluster pressing the fruit, which is common for sparkling wines. It came to us in bins that were full of hand-picked grapes.  Each bin weighs about 15 pounds and approximately 80 bins can fit into the modest press, which was built in West Germany. Yup, I just dated our press, but it is a sturdy piece of equipment!

So why whole-cluster pressing the fruit? Much of it has to do with the flavor profile of the juice you are pressing out, which will become wine. Stems and broken skins can add bitter flavors to juice, which is desirable unless the juice becomes too bitter. Gewurztraminer was an interesting grapes to work with for a sparkling wine because you do not want to lose the playful characters of the wine while making a delicate product. This is where watching the two winemakers I work with, while forming my own opinions, becomes fun!  There is no rule about how long to press fruit for, nor how high you should push the pressure. (Higher pressure=increased flavor extraction from stems and seeds.) Of course, there are general guidelines so you do not burst the bladder in your press or just do something that will ruin beautiful juice.  This is where winemaking becomes more an art than a science (oh, there is plenty of science!), however.

Once the juice is pressed out it goes into a tank and the order of things that I have thus far helped with is: racking, inoculating, adding DAP/Fermaid, making sure that the yeast is happy.  There is probably a correlation between happy yeast and happy winemakers this time of year.

The work is tiring, but beyond satisfying. I love finishing my day and knowing that my muscles are sore because I was working with Mother earth. The draw that I have long had to winemaking is the desire to work with nature while being creative.  I suppose that time will tell if this is something that I enjoy for a sustained amount of time or if it is a fleeting interest. I expect the former, however.

Busy at work loading Chardonnay into the press!

As Chester Cricket would say, "I am feeling Septemberish." Bring on the grapes and bring on Autumn-my first in two years! And now I leave you with a song to start the end of your week:

A Grand Return? No, Not Yet.

This is to state, for the hundredth time, that I am going to return to my blog. The timing could not be worse. The grape harvest is around the corner-days away! Although tonight is not the night that I write a post, I will leave you with a song, "Pirate's Gospel" by Alela Diane. Here's to a bit of writing every few days...