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.

First Solo Flight

"It takes a lot of beer to make wine."

- Every winemaker ever

It's so true. So very, very true. After a long, hard-fought day at a winery--moving heavy objects across an estate, cleaning them, moving them back again, repeating the sequence, making sure yeast and malo cultures are alive and well, processing/analyzing vineyard samples, analyzing juice/fermentation samples, and playing a midday cricket game--what beverage do you think winemakers/interns turn to for relaxation, rejuvenation, and gaseous regurgitation? Yup. Beer. It's delicious, it's bubbly, and it's cold. And it contains smaller quantities of alcohol than wine, so you can drink more cold, bubbly, tasty stuff before it hits you. Really, when you get right down to it, it's the perfect relaxation beverage for the working man.

Figure 1. Ommegang Abbey Ale, served in a goblet glass,

perfect for releasing the abbey ale's rich aromas, as well as

handling its traditionally massive head.

Goblet glass in hand (well, on the table, readily available to me), I can now relax and recount the events of my first solo flight. That is to say: I ran the laboratory on my own today, since my mentor had the day off.

My first day working solo in the lab was (by design) just more of the same, really. More vineyard samples came in, so I ran the usual Brix (sugar), pH, and TA (titratable acids) on them. I checked the malic acid levels on the malolactic culture. I set up a cork trial. I helped grow the yeast culture so that it will be ready to pitch into some Pinot juice starting tomorrow. The usual. Really, once I found my bearings this morning (bright and early at 7:00), it was smooth sailing. All these procedures are burned into my mind at this point. The only trick is not zoning out and relying on autopilot; therein the errors lie. If I keep my focus on the task at hand (however familiar), and make sure I have something to do at any given minute (have to wait while a sample reacts? Time to clean glassware!), then I'm set.

That's really all there is to report today. I did the usual stuff, but on my own for the first time. And no mistakes were made! ... That I know of, or that really matter, since the numbers all worked out today.

Heat Spike, Cricket, and Yeast

You know what the funny thing about weather is? Trick question. There is no funny thing about weather, especially when it does one thing for an entire summer, then turns around 180° and does the exact opposite--and feels that hot, too.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, this has been the coolest summer here in nearly half a century. Which has been okay. Sure, the fruit has taken forever to ripen. But at least it's been ripening! Sure, the vineyard managers had to trim the leaves back super-far on the vines. But it's made up for the lack of warmth on the bunches! Sure, we winery workers have been bored on our asses for a while. But we've made do! Now what's happened? A heat spike. A nasty fuckin' heat spike. How bad? Well, I was taken into a neighboring winery's vineyard on Saturday, after the 100° day, and was shown some severe raisining on their vines. Whole bunches had turned from fat-and-juicy to lean-and-dry in a matter of hours. Hot, dry hours. But such is farming, I suppose. Feast or famine.

Figure 1. Raisined grapes.

Some of our vineyards made out similarly. Some of them were less severely affected. Some of them were hardly affected at all, and their fruit still looks great. It's a mixed bag. What this means for the winemakers is, in a nutshell, grief. And some painful decisions. What do you do in a situation like this? Do you pick? Do you hope for the best and leave the fruit on the vines?

As you can probably guess, it's complicated.

For the vineyards that looks healthy enough to continue ripening on the vines, they will do so. Unless we are threatened with another heat spike; then we will pick them, regardless of how underripe they may be. For the vineyards who are suffering from raisining, we will determine whether or not they can be risked leaving on the vines. If they can hold out, great; we will just employ liberal sorting practices when the fruit comes into winery, disposing of sunburned berries/bunches, leaving whatever good fruit is left to become wine. For the vineyards whose fruit is really suffering, we'll pick them early. The sugars will be a little lower than desired, and the acids will be slightly higher, but we'll manage.

If there's one thing I'd like to say about all this, it's: "quantity will suffer before quality will." Williams Selyem puts the quality of their wines above all else, especially profits. Not to sound like a [limited liability] corporate parrot here, but they understand the importance of putting long-term reputation above short-term income in the priority rankings. So they'll just do the best they can this year and suck it up. Rather, we'll just do the best we can this year, and suck it up. That said, the wines will be good. Some of them will likely be very good. Hell, the Chardonnays are coming along nicely, sunburns be damned. But I doubt anything will be stellar. Hopefully, I'm wrong there. We won't know until the wines have been in barrel for a while. At this point, it's still just speculation.

Anyway, moving on to happier things! For example, look what I can play!

Figure 2. Cricket: the most boring, most thrilling, most confusing game

that I've learned how to play since Magic: the Gathering.

Apparently, at Williams Selyem, the lunch breaks go something like this: eat your food quickly, then assemble teams and play cricket for the duration of lunch hour. And, boy, is that a hell of a lunch hour. Today's teams were divided accordingly: Americans (we down-home chumps) v. Foreigners (all representing former British Empire nations). Who do you think trounced who?

Seriously, though. Have you ever played cricket? Have you ever watched cricket? The came is utterly insane. How many innings are there? Two. Two?! Yes, two. How long do games usually run? Well, it depends. If it's a sound and swift beating, it could only last an hour. If it's evenly matched, or if one team is dominating so unrelentingly that their batters never get out, then the games could last for days. For days. Also, you have to pitch the ball with your arm completely straight. Absolutely zero bending at the elbow is allowed. Seriously. It really fucks with your rotator cuff. And, if you're batting, you can apparently hit the ball in any which direction you like. I don't know if the Aussies were just screwing with my head on that rule, but they claim that it's totally legal to hit the ball in whatever direction you so please--including backwards. Hey, you know what game cricket kinda reminds me of?

Figure 3. Whackbat, from The Fantastic Mr. Fox. If you haven't seen it,

I highly recommend that you do so. It was really incredible, and hilarious.

I realize that this is backward, since whackbat is just Roald Dahl's way of poking fun at cricket, but his pokes struck right on the mark. There were several moments today where the opposing team would cheer and rejoice, and I had to turn to somebody for an explanation--not just unaware of what had just happened, but unaware that anything had happened. Cripes, what a weird game.

After lunch and whackbat, I helped maintain the malolactic yeast culture that we have going (and will continue to have going throughout the harvest). This means checking its temperature (should be around 70°F), checking its sugar and acid levels, and pouring in nutrients. This is where you have to be careful, though. Fermentation produces a lot of CO₂. When you open a take filled with fermenting juice, a lot of it escapes, and it displaces a lot of oxygen in the immediate area. Really, all you have to do is turn your head away, take a deep breath, and hold it in while working with the tank. If you were clumsy (and I do mean clumsy) enough to fall into the tank, or into an empty tank that was just drained of fermenting juice, then you'd likely be totally boned. That is, dead. Quickly. From asphyxiation.

Oh, and if you're curious about what I did over my 5-day weekend, courtesy of a late-starting harvest, here's a very abbreviated list of things that were on my itinerary: a seminar-style tasting at Joseph Phelps Vineyards (where I tasted 2006 Insignia, 2007 Insignia, and 2007 Backus, among others), a tour/tasting at Hendry, a tour/tasting at Chasseur (at which I picked up a few bottles; viva la industry discount!), and a great day at Taste of Sonoma (at which I met up with some old friends, and made some new ones!).

The holiday weekend is over, though (finally), and now it's back to the wine mines. I'm slated to work all weekend, with Monday off (I think?). But that suits me just fine. I've got no better place to be. And that's saying a lot, considering the paradise that surrounds me.

Week Two Round-Up

So much for the daily posts. For the time being, anyway. To be honest, there's only so much preparation a winery can do before fruit arrives. Is all the equipment cleaned? Yup. Are the crush pad, barrel rooms, and cellar cleaned? Affirmative. Are the monthly barrel analyses on last vintage's wines completed? They are. Has the juice for the sparkling wine been analyzed, and have the crushed grapes been disposed of properly? Yes to both.

Oh, that reminds me: We crushed our first batch of fruit this week!

It was exciting to see our first grapes come in, on Tuesday I think it was. About 6 tons of Pinot noir, for use as a sparkling wine base. We gently pressed the grapes, then transferred the juice into a chilled tank, so that there would be no skin contact. (Remember, we want a sparkling white wine from these grapes, a blanc de noir. Skin contact would make it pink.) The juice will stay in the tank, undergo fermentation (we will inoculate it with yeast), and then send it to a small operation in the area that specializes in secondary fermentations, since we just don't have the equipment for that type of stuff. They will take our wine, bottle it with added sugar and yeast, monitor it throughout its fermentation (as a little more alcohol and a lot of carbon dioxide are produced), and then finish it off by removing the yeast/sediment and plugging the bottle with a cork. In the end, we get this back:

Figure 1. Williams Selyem blanc de noir. It's delicious.

I should mention, though, that when I say that "we" pressed the grapes, and then "we" transferred the juice, what I really mean is: "the other interns" pressed the grapes, then "the other interns" transferred the juice. I was busy in the lab running analyses on the vineyard samples. Hey, how else will Bob know when to call in the fruit-picking army? Those acid and sugar levels don't reveal themselves without the help of a lab monkey. I'm not too jealous of the crush crew, though. Sure, they get to play with the fruit, moving, sorting, crushing, and (on the sly) tasting, but I'll get my chance. Right now, I've got to make sure the numbers are satisfactory. And as the grapes race toward the finish line of ripeness at the blazing speed of a stoned tortoise, my job is becoming very important. Vineyard samples will start coming in more frequently in the next week and a half, which means more to do. Exciting times!

On the social scene, the interns have definitely been gelling as a group and as a team. Apparently, this doesn't always happen. Some of my coworkers were recalling brutal harvest seasons, working with people who didn't get along, didn't want to get along, and were generally unpleasant people. I'm very glad that the 2010 Williams Selyem crew is nothing like that. When, at the end of a long day, you can all go hang out at someone's house and down some beers, sip some wine, listen to some music, and just chill, that's a pretty good group to be working with. Apparently, the early-arriving (June) interns found a place up in Dry Creek Valley (land o' great Zin), about 20 or minutes from the winery, called the Dry Creek General Store. It's a nice little shop, with a very Puckett's-esque restaurant inside. And, most importatly, it has a bar. But not just "a bar". The bar (that is, the long wooden installation on which brewskies are served) is fuckin' old. The DCGS bar is still the original, sitting in that location since pre-Civil War days. Just imagine the things that bar as seen. Imagine how many bets have been made, won, and lost there. Imagine how many wine industry deals have gone down there. The fights. The deaths. The conceptions, or perhaps even the births. Here, check this place out:

Figure 2. The DCGS. The bar is on the far left.

You know what the real appeal is, though, to a Tennessee native? Barbecue. Excellent barbecue. On Thursdays, they have all-you-can-eat barbecue, cooked right in front of the bar. It. Is. Glorious. Their wet-style ribs are just as good as any I've had in any part of the South. Really great stuff, especially after a long day at a winery. I think this will become a staple of Thursdays. It's too good to pass up.

So that was Week Two, in a nutshell. Due to all the cleaning being done, and the grapes being not yet ready for picking, the winery has resorted to scheduling interns. I have today and Tuesday off, and am on call Wednesday. That translates to a 4- or potentially 5-day weekend. I'm exhausted, though, so I'm just going to hang around here, I think. Lots of ready to do. And resting up for the coming insanity is a good idea, too. We'll see what happens.