Has it really been since May that I've added to this blog? Well, I've finally felt the need/want to write again. I'd like to thank Sufjan Stevens and his new album for piquing my pen.
5 months after Ethiopia, I've traveled these United States. I've visited with good friends. I've entered photos into a National Geographic contest. I've bottled my homemade coffee stout. I am currently fermenting my second beer (an IPA). I've moved to Yountville in Napa. I've tasted too many wines to list from only a sampling of the wineries that exist in Napa. I've collected a hundred or so corks for a cork art project.
I've just started working for Anomaly Vineyards. While their wines may cost a bit more than you're willing to spend ($85 a bottle), they are exceptionally delicious. Their grapes all come from the St. Helena AVA (American Viticultural Area).
My first day at work I was counting grape clusters per vine and weighing samples of grape clusters to determine how much wine we would make this year. Imagine standing at a vine for the first time. Your job is to count the clusters on this vine and this vine only. The other vine's branches may extend into the one your counting. Be careful. Your grapes may be hiding behind a protective veil of leaves, stems, and vines. Don't lose your count. Did I count this cluster already? And so I created a song in my head. Each note deserving of each counted cluster for that vine. Soon the process may bleed into something similar to what a peeping-tom might experience. Moving this branch or that branch and craning your neck and your eyes in order to get a better look at the delicious grapes that lie at an odd angle to your vision.
While working outdoors is great compared to working in an office, I was a hot sweaty mess throughout the day. Luckily I brought a large canopy-like hat to shield my face and neck from the sun, otherwise I would've been toast (literally and figuratively). At points during the day, I was definitely thinking about how different this was from working in an office. However, on the drive home I was all teeth and wonderment. Their is something absolutely brilliant about working with nature and helping in the process of making something of tangible value. This was my first day.
After I had finished the counts, bottling week came up on us. The morning of I exchanged my tennis shoes for rubber boots. Didn't you know that the primary aspect to making a great wine is cleanliness? We connected a pump to our huge wine tank and flushed it with water, cleaner, then water again, then citric acid, then cleaner again, then water again. The tanks are just one object of the rest of the winery equipment that needs to be cleaned in the same exact way. Everything that touches or can be touched by wine needs to be cleaned in the same exact way. After the tanks were completely sanitized we needed to move the wine into the 2300-gallon tank. All that wine that was sitting in the cellar in 60-gallon wooden barrels now needed to be moved up the tank upstairs. As each barrel is emptied we then need to wash and move all the heavy barrels and restack them so that they are aligned to be absolutely straight. This whole process took about 2 1/2 days to complete.
If you're a small winery and you don't have a bottling facility for your wine, what do you do? Call a bottling truck to come and bottle your wine for you. We had two different trucks come and visit our facility one for large format bottles (1.5 liter, 3 liter, and 6 liters) and another for normal and small format (750 ml and 375 ml). Wow, these trucks are like being in Willy Wonka's factory to make chocolate. Most of the process is completely automated. So now the 2008 wine has been bottled and I'm waiting to work hard again when harvest starts (it's a late season for the 2010 grapes).
For now I'll just taste as many wines as I can to improve my senses.
Jealous! Sounds lke so much fun. :)
Posted by: Beau Smith | September 12, 2010 at 10:04 AM