It is officially Sweater Weather.
Things have really turned in the Napa valley since the last post.
We all tried to enjoy our Sunday off, until it started raining.
Rain during Harvest is sucky (rot issues). And one rain is fine, but then the weather said that it would be rainy for 5 days. That much rain during harvest is murderous.
And that is what has happened.
Suddenly, we had to bring everything in. I mean everything. As busy as we have been, until Monday we had only pulled in about 65% of our total tonnage. The remaining 35% has been coming in over the last 3 days. And soon, we will be all done. We have done more these past 2.5 days than we have in weeks. So much so that we've had to call a temp crew so that we can run 24 hours a day. That's right. 24 hours.
And we still have too much fruit to process and when it arrives at the winery it sits in the bins in our cold cave, queued up.
The report that we saw Tuesday morning forecast ran for 5 days. Now (Wednesday) it has been scaled back to this:
But everything is still coming in.
Besides the exhaustive hours, other problems we are running into are lack of tank space. We currently don't have enough empty tanks to receive the incoming fruit. The tanks we have are filled and still fermenting. So we are having to scoot the wine out prematurely and barrel down before the fermentation is complete. While this wasn't our original intention, it may actually have some positive effects on the wine. Finishing the fermentation in barrel will give those lots more barrel contact time, and that additional time will allow the grape tannins and barrel tannins to better integrate and round out the wine. At least that is the idea.
Another unforeseen issue is a lack of bins. Usually how it goes is; the vineyard growers pick up our empty bins, takes them to their vineyards where they are filled with grapes and then trucked back to the winery. We process the grapes, wash the bins, and they are picked up again by another vineyard.
Well, since everything is coming in at once, we not only don't have enough to begin with, but we are also not turning them over quickly enough. So what does one do? Start calling our buddies with extra bins. Usually these are Sparkling buddies, because the Sparkling wine harvest is much earlier than the Red Wine Harvest, so usually they are done by now. (Thanks Sparkling Friends!)
And it is unfortunate that Intern K and RowBear never got to see the real heart of harvest. Oh sure, RowBear put in plenty of 15 hour days and if you ask him he's seen enough harvest for his lifetime. But that was just bringing in the fruit. Now we are bringing in more fruit than I can wrap my head around AND doing punchdowns AND pumping over all our tanks several times a day, AND barreling down AND pressing AND well, it's lively.
But all this rain has further shortened the harvest and is brining it quickly to an end. You'd think I would be looking forward to this more than I am, and maybe it's the sleep deprivation talking, but I'm not ready for it to be over. It's been such an interesting season, full of new challenges and just when we're hitting our stride, it's hurtling towards the finish line. No winding down, just a full halt stop.
But not yet.
It's almost 11pm, we've been here since 7am, some of us since 5am and we are not quite through. So please excuse the typos and lack of video, I have to go help clean up. But I have abundant footage that will be up soon!
-L
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