I'm Turning into a Smurf

After 2 straight days of sorting and crushing grapes, my hands have taken on a deep purple color.  I'm afraid that if I keep working at this job, I'm going to look like this:

As long as I never look like this guy, things will be OK:

All this Wine Needs Is a Good Bleeding

Some of our bins of crushed Zinfandel and Syrah have been inoculated with yeast, and they're now fermenting outside the cold room. Before the yeast was added, we bled some of the juice and dumped it down the drain.  This raises two questions: One, why waste some perfectly good juice? Two, why bleed the must by removing some of the juice?

Let's consider Question Two first: Red wine is made by ensuring that the juice is constantly in contact with the grape skins during fermentation. If that doesn't happen, you end up with rosé. To ensure that you have the right juice-to-skin ratio, it's often necessary to remove some of the juice. This means that we'll get some nice, concentrated wine with dark red coloring -- maybe even a little purple.

As for Question One, that's a tough one. We just don't have enough juice to make a good batch of rosé. It would be nice to do it, but we'd need a separate tank (it's usually aged in steel), a different bottle, a new label, etc. And since rosé gets no respect in this country, it's not very profitable. In France, however, they're serious about their rosé.

It reminds me of an incident that happened at a restaurant a few months ago. My wife and I were having dinner and a woman at the next table said something like, "Ah rosé, I remember those years!" I should have asked her if she was new to wine because her comment was condescending and ignorant, but I think I just smiled politely. If rosé is good enough for Joël Robuchon's Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris, it's good enough for me. I just wish we hadn't dumped a barrel's worth down the drain.

Bye bye!

FYI, if anyone is curious, we bleed anywhere from 20% to 30% of juice from the must. That means that if we process 3 tons of grapes (1 ton = roughly 150 gallons of must after de-stemming), we'll bleed as much as 135 gallons of juice.

   

No Cork Soaking Necessary

Most wineries don't have their own bottling equipment. It's expensive, takes up a lot of room, and isn't used too frequently. Wineries use mobile bottling trucks that drive in for the day, fill bottles, and spit out complete cases of wine.

While it's efficient, it makes certain tasks more difficult.  Let's say you want to bottle a few dozen magnums, for example.  You can't call in a bottling truck just for that, but you can uncork some 750 ml bottles and pour 2 into each empty magnum bottle ("marrying bottles", as bartenders would say).  But how do you cork them back up?

First, a quick laugh re: corking bottles (NSFW if your coworkers are uptight people with no sense of humor):  http://www.hulu.com/watch/19187/saturday-night-live-cork-soakers

And now, this is how it's really done:

  

1 Ton of Pinot Noir

If you're processing 1 ton of fruit, it means you're doing 30 minutes of sorting and crushing, followed by 3 hours of cleanup. That's what we did yesterday, as only 2 bins of Pinot Noir grapes came in. Pinot Noir berries are quite small, and for some reason the de-stemmer sprayed grapes all over the crush pad. Cleanup ended up taking most of the remainder of the day.

Here's what the Pinot looked like:

Not-so-great-looking Pinot Noir

INTERESTING FACT:  Do you know how to tell if grapes are ripe? Wine grapes have to ripen a lot more than table grapes, so an easy trick to gauge the ripeness of a wine grape is to eat its seeds. Unlike bitter table grape seeds, they should be crunchy and toasty without any bitterness. They should have the consistency of roasted coffee beans, meaning that they'll crunch and break apart as you chew them.
      

Literature Class

Since today is a rest day (my fourth in a row), I'll take a few paragraphs to explain the name of this blog. It's obviously a lame play on words on the title of John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning book -- a book that I completely abhorred in high school.

Despite the sleep-inducing pace of Steinbeck's doorstop-worthy book, it has some pretty important parallels that led me to use it as my blog's title. For a quick refresher on the plot line, here's a Wikipedia article that summarizes the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath.

Set against the carnage of the Great Depression, the main characters (the Joad family) leave their foreclosed Midwestern farm to journey to California. Though on a grander scale, their plight is not much different than that faced by millions of American during our current Great Recession. Like them, I've made the trip across the country, looking for better opportunities.

Agriculture is a prominent theme of the book, and the poor treatment of low-wage farm workers is central to the plot. I can't help but notice that the grapes that I'm processing were probably picked by hard-working farm laborers that made very little money so that we can enjoy our $35 bottles of wine. When I watch the news, I see nothing but angry, white Midwesterners that complain about illegals, but I'm pretty sure that none of them have made the trip to NorCal to pick farm produce. They certainly aren't packing up their belongings to make the journey as they did in the 1930s. Maybe they've lost the drive that people like the Joads had, the desire to find a better life, to move on at all costs, to travel to that new frontier for a better chance at a decent living.

Like the Joads, I'm upending my life to take a journey down an unknown path.  I trust that it'll work out, but it's a big risk and the rewards are uncertain. Though not out of necessity, I am forgoing familiarity and experiencing a radical change in my standard of living.  I am hoping that the gamble will pay off.

Finally, Steinbeck used a character named Jim Casy as a sort of "savior" who takes the fall for a crime committed by one of the Joads. It's an obvious reference to Jesus Christ (they share the same initials). Like Jim Casy, my winery also shares the same initials in its name, though they are simply the initials of the founder.  Still, I'd like to think that it'll save me from a life of corporate drudgery.  It's a stretch, I know, but I just had to draw that last parallel!