Ground to dust and ash

Happy Monday.

When the crew arrived at the winery this morning at 7am, there were already 7 tons of Sauvignon blanc waiting for us in yellow lugs:

At 9am, another 7 tons came:

Then, at 11am we received another 15.6 tons.  Apologies for the grainy quality, our cave is dark.  The fruit was arriving faster than we could sort it, so it was put into the cave to keep cool, lest it start to warm up and ferment.  Those big boys are called macro bins.  We received 22 of them.

This winery has never, since it's existences (5 harvests) attempted to process this much fruit in one day.  More typically we process 7 to 12 tons a day comfortably.  Twenty ton days are pretty heavy, and a 30 ton day is unheard of.  We got close to that in 2005 because that was a huge year, 2009 was also pretty high yielding.  2007 not so much, and 2008 was laughably tiny in the Napa Valley.

While there was a lot of activity going on in the cellar, T was off in the hot sun collecting more cluster samples while I stayed behind in the climate controlled lab (as a punishment for bunging up the maturity samples last week, he knows what he did).  By noon we had gotten through 8 of the 30 tons, quick math says we're working a 16 hour day.  Besides processing more fruit than ever before, we have to barrel down last week's fruit.  And by we I mean the cellar guys.  Me, I just work on this blog, sometimes I send emails.

It is now 7pm.  Still a lot of fruit to go and people are getting cranky.

T went to get pizza for the crew.  If you lived in Napa, and worked overtime then you would be eating pizza like this with names like Vespa and Ducati:

T and I are eating this pizza.

7:30pm, dinner is over and T and I go to the destemmer (this literally separates the berries from the rachis and destemms the clusters) and help sort fruit.  

For 4 hours.

Finally it is clean up time.

This is out intern K. It is close to midnight now.  It is his first harvest, as you can see, he wants to shoot himself in the head.

Ok. Time to go home.

 Today's Tunes: While collecting fruit as his punishment, T listened to more Taylor Swift.  I had another Phoenix dance party.  Phoenix Pizza Party.  From 7pm to 11:30pm while sorting we listened to the best of early 90s rap. Thanks Warren G. 

Up Next: I swear I will learn how to upload a video.  

Also, Parting Words from Intern K's Last Week and RowBear Reviews.



Editor's Note: I learned how to post a video.  Here it is:



We will spice up future with a symphonic accompaniment but we didn't want to miss Intern K's sorting table gem.