Interlude: Half-Way There

I apologize for the sparse posts, but when I have time to myself, I elect to spend it sleeping or eating. There's not much time or energy for anything else. The rumors are true, folks. Harvest is an all-consuming experience.

Just to say that I've posted more than one post in the month of Octobere two scenes from the winery these days.

Figure 1. [video removed] The Williams Seylem Harvest Crew supports their

winemaker, Phil, by performing their new theme fr digging tanks:

"Diggin' on a Prayer

Figure 2. My employee allocation: 12 bottles, discounted 50%.

Figure 3. The mix-'n-mingle part of the 2010 Harvest Party for winery

employees, growers, and guests. Location: the brand new Estate facility.

Figure 4. A gigantic live oak growing over/around a boulder, as seen

on the walk to the patio, where we had our fabulous meal.

Figure 5. A magnum of '93 Allen. It was excellent. Still had plenty

of good fruit (ripe red berries), but awesome depth and complexity

from the extended aging. There's still plenty of life left in that wine.

Figure 6. The 6L bottle signed by the Williams Selyem staff, presented

to the evening's guests of honor, Burt and Jan Williams. Seeing as the

winery wouldn't exist today without the key support in the 80s from

vineyard owner Joe Rochioli, the bottle is appropriately full of 2007 (an

outstanding vintage) Rochioli Riverblock.

Figure 7. The gorgeous engraving of the brand new Estate facility.

Top signatures are those of the Dysons (winery owners), and

Bob Cabral, executive winemaker.

Figure 8. The view from my seat at the dinner table: Estate vineyards.

Figure 9. Left to right: magnums of 2004 Bacigalupi Zinfandel

and 1993 Allen Pinot noir. Yum.

Figure 10. Fancy menu.

Figure 11. A stunningly vibrant bottle, considering its age. The 1998 Hirsch

(seriously Sonoma Coast) tasted so young that it could have passed for a 2008.

Figure 12. The Heavyweights' table. Visible: Burt Williams (left, facing right),

John Dyson (blue shirt, far end of table). Behind the waitress: Joe Rochioli.

Figure 13. A glass of 2006 late harvest gewurztraminer. Incredible with

(or as) dessert, it tasted like honeyed figs sprinkled with roasted nuts.

Figure 14. The view from the Estate's patio, facing south.

Figure 15. Another view of the gnarly live oak, with the Estate

building behind it.

Figure 16. Estate vineyard, facing east.

Figure 17. Newly planted vines in the Estate vineyard, facing southwest.

Figure 18. I took more liberties with the label maker, branding

the ferm container with a name stripped from a painfully 80s pop band.

Culture Club: An Update

In case you were wondering and hadn't already noticed, harvest is very time consuming. Just exactly how time consuming is harvest? My last paycheck was for 115 hours over a period of two weeks, during which I had a single day off. Some days were shorter than others, but the longest ones were about 12 hours. At a winery, that's pretty rough.

My schedule now goes something like this: wake up at 5:30; be at the winery and working by 7:00; spend the morning inoculating tanks and building yeast/malolactic cultures; break for lunch and whackbat at noon; work in the laboratory or build more cultures as needed, until 5 or 6. The lab work isn't nearly as exhausting as the culture stuff, since lab work doesn't involve running around with 5-gallon buckets of juice/wine for five hours at a time. The lab drains a person in its own special ways, though, such as running enzymatic analysis (post-press malic acid and residual sugar content) on 25+ samples at the same time, in a room that's between 80 and 85 degrees.

All the work is paying off, however. At the end of this week, we'll be between 85 and 90 percent through with crushing fruit. All the Russian River Pinot is in, as is much of the Chardonnay. Most of the Sonoma Coast Pinot is in. All the Central Coast Pinot is in. All we're waiting on at this point is some Russian River Chard, the port varietals, and the tiny quantity of Zin that we're getting this year (all of 4 tons, from what I hear). It's been a brutal vintage for Zinfandel here. The severe cold-weather pruning left the grapes exposed and vulnerable to sunburn and raisining during the heat spike, resulting in massive crop losses. Being the sticklers for quality that Williams Seylem are, this translates to tiny (or no) shipments of high quality grapes from affected vineyards.

Whenever the rest of the grapes come in, though, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing. Fruit comes in on Day Zero, gets crushed on Day One, cold soaks in its own juice until Day Five, and is then inoculated (by yours truly... mostly) with yeast from a culture that was grown on Day Three. When it's almost done fermenting, I pitch in a malolactic bacteria culture (prepared when fermentation really gets cookin'). And speaking of fermentations, check this out:

Figure 1. A fermentation tank with some very happy yeast.

There's plenty of wine underneath the cap, which is itself a good

eight or twelve inches below the layer of foamy goodness.

In other news, today was Headband Day at the winery. The trend, started by intern John, has become an official weekly event. Of course, being a cog in a well-oiled machine such as Williams Selyem's harvest crew, I had to participate.

Figure 2. Headband made of blue masking tape. Also notice

the 7am glaze over the eyes, the need-another-day-off bags

underneath them.

Hopefully my senses will return to me when things slow down after crush, when the daily routine becomes more about monitoring malic acid, VA, and sulfur levels in the newly vinted/barreled wines--as opposed to hauling two 50-pound buckets o' juice around for hours on end. Senses will be key for that work, as it will involve much barrel climbing, something you should never do with anything less than a sound mind. Much like handling blue masking tape, which should never be handled by a sleep deprived man on Headband Day.

Ever.

Interlude: Internship Images

I just finished my 7th consecutive day of work, with days averaging about between 10 and 11 hours. I'm tired. Physically and mentally. It looks like I'll have a day off on either Wednesday or Thursday. I just don't have the concentration or energy at this point to write an entry, not until I have a day off. So, in lieu of a post, here are some random images from the last week.

Figure 1. There is an ongoing competition to see who can "dig out"

a fermentation tank the fastest. As you can see, the stakes are high.

This shit is real.

Figure 2. Super Harvest Moon setting below the hills of the

Russian River Valley, along Westside Road, just west of Healdsburg.

Figure 3. Fruit being dumped into a fermentation tank. After it's all

in there (between 10 and 20 bins like this one), it's raked flat, covered

with dry ice pellets and a tarp, and left to sit for several days before

fermentation is started, so as to extract good color.

Figure 4. The view from atop a tank that I was gassing with argon gas

(to displace oxygen). That's the Allen vineyard, source of some great Pinot.

Figure 5. Another view from atop the same tank. Those are all

fermentation tanks. The platform there is actually on wheels, so it

can roll over any tanks on that side of the fermentation pad, to make

punchdowns easier on us interns.

Figure 6. Filling barrels in the cellar, post-press. This is wine, folks.

Figure 7. An enormous slug! Found it oozing around the entrance

to the fermentation room. I moved it to safety.

Figure 8. Some kind of really pretty moth that I found.

Run, GMC

Have you ever shown up to a place, announced your name, and then been immediately handed a nickname? For example, I showed up at Williams Selyem, and within a day or so of everyone knowing my name, one of them--The Reverend--proclaimed that he would thereafter refer to me as Bombay, in omaggio to the greatest youth hockey coach of all time. In a matter of days, that name morphed into Sapphire, which I still hear on occasion. Now, though, things have taken a sharp turn. Through a tangled web of esoteric monikers, I've most recently been dubbed GMC. That is, Guest Mad Chemist. This name arises from the Williams Selyem crew's name for my mentor, Patrick. Excuse me, I mean Mad Chemist "MC" Inoculator. I came to be known on Saturday as GMC, when MC (or, more formally, The Inoculator) had the day off.

So it was that young grasshopper was handed the reigns of power and responsibility for the second time this harvest season.

Figure 1. Some sort of freaky grasshopper superhero thing.

Or maybe it's a super villain? I don't know. Posting this

seemed like a good idea at the time.

Anyway, the point is, I was on my own for Saturday. As GMC, I was responsible for the usual stuff: processing vineyard samples (sugar and acid analyses), growing yeast cultures (for inoculating juice with, to begin fermentation), checking yeast culture health, and, of course inoculating juice with yeast. Now, that's enough work to keep a couple of people busy throughout a day. They'll be especially manic when the boss wants all of it done by lunchtime, per usual. Saturday, however, was very short-staffed, so the midday deadline only applied to vineyard sample analyses and inoculations. The sample deadline is for the boss's convenience, so that decisions about grape picking can be made faster. The inoculations, however, really do have to be done before lunch. Actually, they should be done before 11am, because that's when midday punchdowns occur. And, yes, let me explain the concept of punchdowns before I go any further.

When fermenting wines are left in contact with grape skins, the skins will float to the top of the juice/wine. After sitting for a while, they form a hard, dense layer atop the liquid. This is known as the "cap". Since color and tannin are extracted from the skins and into the liquid, contact between them is crucial. So, as to ensure sufficient contact/extraction, the cap must be pushed down into the liquid on a regular basis, either by physical force, or by pumping juice from the bottom of the tank onto the cap. We do this several times per day at Williams Selyem, and all by manual force--absolutely no pumps are allowed to touch the juice/wine at any time during production.

Figure 2. A man performing a cap punchdown.

There are a couple variations on the manual punchdown, though. Above is the more common, handheld method, which is absolutely exhausting. There are also pneumatic devices which do the exact same thing, but require more intense mental focus than physical exertion. If you want to be very traditional--"naked" if you will--in your winemaking practices, then you could always take this route:

Figure 3. "Naked" winemaking taken to its literal end.

See this link for a quasi-explanation of this

personal/public/pubic health tragedy.

But[t] I digress. Again, while vineyard samples are processed before lunchtime for reasons regarding quicker management and decision making, yeast inoculations are completed before punchdowns for logistical reasons. Insofar as I can tell, it's just so the punchdown crew (which takes up a lot of space on the fermentation pad, where all the tanks are located) can do their work without maneuvering around some guy pitching yeast culture into tanks.

Figure 4. A tank of Pinot noir grapes/juice that I had just

inoculated with yeast culture. The scale is sort of hard to

discern here, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the length of

tank visible in this photo is about five or six feet. In this

tank is somewhere between 3 and 5 tons of fruit.

There are a bunch of small logistical concerns associated with this work. For example, keeping track of what buckets have held which juice, and whether or not that juice was inoculated with yeast already. If it was, you'd better clean it damn well before using it with some non-inoculated juice, or else you could accidentally start a fermentation on a tank that isn't ready for it. Painter's tape and Sharpies are your best friends here, great for making labels in a pinch. (If you hadn't pieced it together already, cleanliness and attention to detail are necessities when making fine wine.) Since I'm still finding my rhythm with this stuff, inoculations and yeast culture build-ups can take me a little while. But I think I've got a pretty good system so far, one in which I'm capable of inoculating two tanks on my own in a little less than an hour. Because of the time crunch and having to do the inoculations on my own, it was a very tiring morning. I was running back and forth from the fermentation room (where we keep all the yeast cultures) to the tanks of fruit, all the while carrying buckets full of yeasty juice or equipment. It made for a hell of a workout.

Figure 5. Me, in the fermentation room, filling a bucket with

yeast culture, with which to inoculate a tank of fruit.

The inoculations took all morning. In the afternoon, I had to do some yeast culture build-ups, which entails just adding more juice to the cultures, along with some nutrients for the yeast. That's easy work that just requires following some directions, making some simple calculations, and trying to not spill anything (because cleaning the ferm room sucks). That should only have taken about two hours, but thanks to various tasks that needed attending to, it ended up taking until about 5:30. All in all, it ended up nearly being another 11-hour day.

But you know what? I still like coming to work in the morning. The only limiting factor to how long I can be there is comfort. 10 hours of running around playing GMC can really wear a dude out. If my feet and energy level could handle it, though, I'd probably be there until midnight each and every day.

Interlude: Hans Brix

Today, in addition to doing lab work, sorting grapes, and pressure washing the fermentation pad, I also took some liberties with the label maker. Behold! Hans Brix, handheld refractometer! (It measures degrees brix. Har har.)

Figure 1. Hans Brix.

If this makes absolutely zero sense to you, click here.

The Sorting Table

Regardless of the winemaking techniques one might employ, no matter what fancy equipment one might use, and certainly despite all the care and respect one may have for the juice, excellent wine can only be made from excellent fruit. That's the harsh reality of it. You can't make good wine from bad grapes. That'd be like trying to make ice cream from skim milk, or a butterfly from an Alot. So how--even in a stellar vintage--do you ensure that the grapes going into the wine are going to be consistently as top-notch as they can be? Like this:

Figure 1. A standard sorting table.

The instructions are simple. As the grapes go by, just remove anything that isn't a grape or a stem. This includes (but is certainly not limited to) leaves, raisins, underripe grapes, botrytized (moldy) bunches, and (whether you want to hear it or not) bugs. (I saved three spiders today from a cold, juicy death.) At first, the work is very demanding of attention. You have to really focus on the grapes, decide what you will and will not allow to roll past, and then act--all rather quickly. I think the conveyor was moving at about 3 inches per second, or a foot every four seconds. That's a pretty good pace. It ain't the "rabbit" on your lawnmower, but it sure ain't the "turtle", either.

After a while, the work does become routine. Your brain starts to relax, and your eyes and hands do the work on their own. You would probably think that these circumstances would be prime for zoning out, for getting a mental breather in, especially after a morning full of high-speed laboratory analysis. That's what I assumed, at least.

Boy, was I wrong.

As it turns out--when you're working at a sorting table for two straight hours, getting no breaks longer than the 15-seconds between bins of fruit being dumped onto the conveyor, understanding absolutely zero of the conversation between your other 5 line workers (middle-aged Mexican women)--your mind wanders. A lot. In the span of those two hours, I had more ideas, insights, and internal dialogs than I've probably had in the last week. At times, I felt like I was high. For example, this thought occurred to me around hour 1.5: This table is such a good metaphor for the arrow of Time, all moving in one direction 'n shit. Or, even better than that one: This table is such a good metaphor for eugenics, all creating a better result by weeding out the weak 'n shit. Alright, maybe that's not so much "high" thinking as it is "hair-brained literary'". But a lot of literature is conceived while high. So.

The most profound thought I had (not to imply that the previous two were) was the realization that, by being on sorting duty, I was as directly involved in the process of making wine as I will probably ever be at Williams Selyem. Sure, determining accurate sugar and acid content in samples is important. Yes, proper yeast culture build-up and inoculation is key. But those are just manipulations of the grapes. By deciding what grapes do or do not make it into the wine, I am directly responsible for the potential that the wine has. I help determine the upper limit of quality. I am both the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster for salvaging an off-vintage, as well as making a good one great.

Figure 2. Gatekeeper (left) and Keymaster (right).

When you think about it, that's some serious responsibility. Not only are the customers going to notice if the final product tastes strange (raisiny, green, etc.), but it affects the company and its reputation. It also affects me. After all, I'm here to make the best damn wines that I possibly can, and to learn how to make them. It'd be nothing short of cognitive dissonance to hold those motivations and not do the best that I could at the sorting table, recognizing the importance of that job.

Therefor, for two hours after lunch today, I sorted grapes like a goddamn champion.

After that, though, I was given the task of pressure washing the entire fermentation pad, so as to prevent the fruit flies and bees from swarming. If I learned anything today, it was this: I pressure wash like a goddamn champion of special needs. Embarrassing as it is to admit it, I suck at pressure washing grape skins and stems from a concrete floor into a drain. Believe it or not (and I have it on good authority that you should), it would actually have taken me less time to pick up every single grape skin individually--with my fingers--than to use a pressure washer. Here's hoping that they don't assign that job to me again.

Figure 3. No pressure washing for Gordon.

First 11-Hour Day

(See title.)

Goodnight.