News from the Harvest

Ouch. A bad omen, I suppose, that only a few weeks into this venture I' m late with promised posts. Oh well. Nothing new as far as my track record goes.

Today, at the winery where I work, we finished up the very last of this year's harvest. Yesterday several tons of Petit Manseng (remember Petit Manseng?) came in, and got put into the crusher/destemmer as usual. The job of the crusher/destemmer is, obviously to crush the grapes so the juice starts to flow and remove the stems from the grapes. After they're crushed it's fairly easy to pump the semi-solid mass of crushed grapes through a hose from the crusher into the press.

In this case, though, the Manseng was severely dehydrated from being left on the vine this long. (Which is good in the sense that it will provide sweeter juice, which equals more alcohol after fermentation. More sugar is always better.) It turns out the grapes had lost so much water that there was actually not enough moisture for them to form any sort of mass whatsoever. This resulted in the destemmer being clogged with a mass of un-destemmed grapes, which put a serious dent in our winemaker's plans. It also put a dent in his lower back muscles, as he ended up having to shovel the remainder of the grapes into the press via pitchfork; this is called "whole cluster pressing" (as opposed to the less attractive but more effecient "chewed-up grape pulp method").

The severe drawback to this method was that every pressload is about half of its usual capacity (which is 2.5 tons or so on a good day). This meant we had to do a second run on the Manseng, since they were unable to finish pressing the entire crop last night. So this morning I was up bright and surly to pitchfork 1800 lbs. of grapes into 30 lb. "lugs" (small red boxes), which our winemaker and his assistant would then dump into the press. To everyone's relief, we were done by 2:30, which left us plenty of time for playing darts. (I bet no one ever told you that's how all harvests end, with sharp thrown objects.)

All in all, I was surprised by how harvest ended up turning out, at least on my end. I mean, sure, there was physical labor and some pain (less than I expected--also fewer injuries resulting in bloodstained clothes), but nowhere near as bad as, say, the time I had to weedwhack the bank of the river behind the winery. Overall I say harvest opened my eyes to new aspects of winemaking without damping my enthusiasm.

Plus, darts AND heavy machinery? I think P.J. O'Rourke would concur that that is the definition of a good time.

We interrupt our currently nonexistent broadcasting...

Okay, here's the deal. I know I haven't posted much lately, and I know I meant to make this an at-least-every-two-days deal. So far I've done...fairly well...at that, and I'm going to make every attempt to do better from here on out.

It's actually been a bit tough, coming up with subjects. Not that there aren't plenty--I just want to have enough to write about without being repetitive. Also, I'm still broadening my horizons as it is. Current post ideas on the books include:

-Getting a more in-depth look at the Virginia wine industry by focussing on individual wineries (ones I've visited and know something about, naturally)
-Wine stores in Charlottesville, Virginia (Market St. and Tastings, mainly)
-The enology program at Virginia Tech
-Wine and food pairings (stick with the classics, yeah?)

Anyway. One of those, or maybe something that comes to me between now and tomorrow, will be appearing as soon as regularly scheduled posting resumes. Until then...

We haven't been lax, we've been drinking

Charlottesville, Virginia is the home of one of my favorite places--The Downtown Mall. The Mall was created when they put brick over the original main street (at least the eastern end) and turned it into a pedestrian area only, leaving up the original storefronts. In one particularly delicious case, they left the lettering and marble front of the Keller and George jewelers up. (It's now a bookstore.) So on days like today it's a great place to kill a few hours and get a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, or maybe something to eat.

And now there's a place you can do all three if you want. It's called Enoteca, and I just visited it for the first time on Thursday. It specializes in Italian wines--reds, whites, sweet, and sparkling--along with different types of bruschetta, panini, and a lot of really cool desserts (like fairly inexpensive tiramisu).

The only danger is if you live anywhere in Charlottesville, you'll probably get addicted to it and end up blowing your paychecks trying all the wines they've got, especially the white wines. For someone like me, it's a constant frustration to go to a wine store and look under the white wines in the "Italy" section, only to find a surfeit of Pinot Grigio. There are so many other grapes grown in Italy--Malvasia, Trebbiano, Verdicchio--and yet you rarely see those, either as varietals or proprietary blends.

And now you can! You can enjoy a glass of wine for between eight and ten dollars, which may seem steep but is (somewhat more) reasonable when you consider that you'll get a glass of wine at local wineries for about six dollars or so.

Plus--what could be wrong with a place that serves wine, coffee, AND beer?