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.