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.