We thought we were busy last week, until this week happened.
Me: "Hey T, how do I impress upon people how busy we've been this week versus last week?"
T: "Last week was so September, but this week is October and October is popping off."
Well, there you have it.
The last Sauvignon blanc finally came in on Tuesday. This marked the end of the White Harvest here. Usually we have a solid week to two weeks of break between when the white grapes stop coming in and the red grapes begin. However, this year's extraordinary weather patterns have smashed the white and red harvest together, a most unfortunate event. The mild summer temperatures meant things took forever to ripen (delaying the start of White Harvest), and for several weeks we were twiddling our thumbs and cleaning tanks a million times to pass the time, then a few blazing hot days forced everything to get ripe (aka raisin) too quickly and we had to haul it in. What we normally take 3 months to bring in has been shortened to two months.
This has had some unintended consequences besides general fatigue and broken spirits.
Being at work 14 to 16 hours a day for the last 11 days means I have not been able to pay any bills. My rent is late and I think they are going to shut off my power soon, but since I get home around 10pm anyway and fall straight into bed, it may be a few days before I notice. Other things that don't get done: laundry, grocery shopping and exercising. My body misses yoga.
T misses sleep and free time, but mostly he misses his family. They are asleep when he leaves and asleep when he gets back. He hasn't missed paying bills because he has auto-pay, which he says I should look into. He also misses golfing.
T: "Golfing is my yoga."
Despite our 100 hour work weeks, even I haven't seen T as much as usual since he's been gone most days sampling the vineyards.
These are all the vineyard samples he brought back on Wednesday.
We were using every container we could find to hold the grapes. That was about 3.5 hours of collection and 3.5 hours of processing.
Here are a few quick clips of our days this past week. We've been working so late that we've been ending our nights by eating pizza dinners by forklift light. In other forklift related fashion: Frankie shows off his forkifting skillz by flipping a penny. All of the above vineyard samples provided us with plenty of juice for our Lab Wine Project. However, a most unfortunate side effect of being so busy is forgetting about said lab project. Since filling Rita, we collected more juice to fill another 5 gallon carboy, however, we left the juice sitting out too long and in too warm conditions and the bottles started to ferment on their own. We came in Thursday morning to a big mess in the lab since overnight the bottles started to ferment and subsequently explode. Then we put the rest of the bottles in the sink to relieve the pressure and well, you'll see what happened. Unfortunately the first bottle was the most impressive and that was not caught on camera.
We lost a fair amount of juice, but we got some more and now Rita has a mate. We expect great things from Finton. Firstly his juice is more ripe than Rita's was and has more color. We also will not be mixing in SB juice with our Cab. Another difference is that Rita was inoculated with fancy yeast, but Finton is all native baby.
Dinner time!
We are all heading out into the night for Chinese food (by forklift light) and GCMJ also bought some ice cream to reward the hardworking crew.
-T & L
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