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.
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