Day One: Saturday August 25th

 It's Saturday August 25th at 6am and my partner Todd and I headed to Woodland to pick up the half ton of fruit we bought.  We arrive at the vineyard a little after sunrise.

It's finally happening.  My 6th Harvest will finally be my own wine.  Several months of planning and plan changing are converging in Woodland.  Originally Todd and I looked at Custom Crush facilities, but they were cost prohibitive and more importantly would not allow us to do our own work (for legal reasons).  To get the most out of the experience and be financially prudent we decided to forgo professional places and make the wine at home.  Old school.

 Woodland is a warmer climate than Napa, and white wine grapes tend to be ready to pick before red wine grapes and we are doing this project in addition to our real jobs, so we had to pick this weekend.

Here the vineyard manager is hosing off the half ton bin that we are borrowing to haul our fruit back to Napa.

 Didn't see any snakes this morning, but lots of skin.

 Two guys started hand picking the 0.25 tons of Viogner and 0.25 tons of Marsanne at 5am.  Which is actually a late start, but that's all they were picking this morning.  Depending on how much there is to pick crews can start as early as 3am to be done by late morning.  You don't want to pick when the day starts to get hot.  You want to keep the fruit as cool as possible as it is coming in.

 The guys harvest the clusters in the small bins.

 Then a tractor with a flat bed passes through the rows to collect the bins.

 The tractor drives up to Todd's truck and we all dump the small bins into the white half ton bin.

 By 7:30am we are leaving the Woodland vineyard and headed back to Napa.

 At 8:30am we had the truck and the fruit back at my house!

 If we had arrived at a winery a forklift would have taken the bin from the truck to the destemmer.  

But since this is home winemaking and resources are limited and we are working on a micro scale, instead of forklift removing the fruit my sister helped us move fist fulls of clusters into buckets and then the buckets to the destemmer.

 We have turned my garage into our humble winery.  We borrowed a basket press, destemmer (on top of the barrels) and two half ton bins.  So far we have bought the fruit and 3 neutral white french oak barrels from another winery as well as a barrel rack (pictured).  We will probably also need to buy an AC unit to keep the garage cold once the fermentation begins.

It took us 3 hours to hand feed all the fruit into the destemmer.  Todd slipped in the clusters while I cranked the gears.  For. Three. Hours.  A real winery has a motor running the destemmer.  It wouldn't normally take so long for half a ton of fruit but we didn't want to crush the berries before destemming them, so we had to slip each cluster below the rollers and that really slowed the process.  

We wanted as many whole berries as possible to make it through to the bin because crushing the berries releases more juice and more opportunity for microbial activity.  Then we added dry ice we bought at the grocery store to keep the fruit cold during the next 24 hours of skin contact and covered it with a plastic tarp.  

Temperature control is probably a home winemakers bigest challenge.  We want to fruit to remain as cold as possible so we can extract phenolics from the skins but not start to ferment and discourage other microbes from spoiling our grapes.  Wineries usually add sulfur to the fruit at this point to prevent microbial activity, but we didn't have any, so that's that.

-Lucia

Large Format Bottling

Because Bottling is pretty much everyone's least favorite time of the year.  I'm starting with a picture I took this Sunday of Bodega Bay.  I was in Bodega Bay picking up a table from Craigslist.  Turns out it's not nearly as far from Napa as I thought it was.  Only took an hour to get to the water.  I need to make a point to leave Napa more often.

Also in un-bottling related updates: there was a camera crew filming a video of how we do cork sensory.  They filmed me setting up a sensory and then talking about the process.  It was really uncomfortable to be on the other side of the camera but I'm looking forward to seeing what professional cameras and editing capture.

So Bottling the 2010 vintage:

Bottling is my least favorite time of year because it means work starts everyday at 5:30am (and there are a few unluckier souls than I, that start at 4:30am).  They are long days and monotonous because it's the same thing every hour of everyday for weeks and weeks and weeks.

 We spent the last 4 weeks bottling all the 750ml, 375ml and 1.5L bottles.  This last week (the fifth straight of bottling) we tackled the 3L, 6L and 9L bottles.  The bottle on the left is a regular 750ml and the ones on the right are 3L.

The large format bottles can't go on the bottling line because they are too large and we make too few of them to make it worth it.  So we bottle them by hand.  The first step is to inspect the glass for defects.  Then two bottles at a time are turned upside down where they are first rinsed with water and then sparged with nitrogen to displace the air inside.

The wine travels from the tank (background) to this small filler.  Here Pablo is checking the filling speed since this is the morning start up.


And then one by one the bottles are moved from the table to the filler.



We can fill 8 bottles at a time.  With our normal line for 750mls bottles we fill 20 bottles at a time.  Then we  check the fill height with a ruler and send the bottle to be corked.

The bottling line for our 750ml bottles has a corker head with 4 jaws so we can cork 4 bottles at the same time.  For the larger bottles we have a single jaw that we use to manually insert the corks.

It takes at least 2 people to insert the cork.  One person to make sure the bottle is centered and has a good seal with the jaw (otherwise the device has trouble pulling a vacuum before inserting the cork) and then a second person to pull the lever that compresses the cork to insert it.

Bottling is done for the year and now the lab is busy with grape and juice samples.  And by "busy" I mean "sticky".

-L

I do not have the most fish bowl lab . . .

This picture of the vines was taken a few days ago.  Currently all our vineyards have reached veraison (when 50% of the fruit has darkened).  This means a lot of work for the lab analyzing the berry samples that are collected by our field sampler intern.

During the summer months the winery gets a lot of visitors and the lab turns into a fishbowl.  However recently I visited a lab that was more exposed than my own, a fact I thought impossible.

My lab has large windows.  But the lab at the California Academy of Sciences has an entire wall made of glass for people to observe the work.

I bet many more tours pass through this lab than my own.  Additionally, for those who are not able to step inside, there is a large screen right outside the lab showing in detail what the technicians are doing.  You can see the camera mounted above the woman in the middle of the picture.

I don't know what she's doing to "prepare the American Golfinch" but it looks pretty gross.

 This is a view out to Golden Gate Park from the second floor of the building.

 What a cool place to be a lab rat.

 Also, they have baby ostriches.  So jealous.

 -Lucia

Seattle, For a Day

I have to say that I find few things weirder than getting on an airplane with nothing.  I have my electronic ticket confirmation on my iphone, no luggage to check, no carry-on to bring and a one way ticket.  It sounds like the life of a terrorist but it's also the life of a business person flying to a meeting for the day.  Or in my case, a lab rat pretending to be a business person.

And so two weeks after being in Portland I again found myself on a plane to the north west.  I was only in Seattle for 5 hours so a lot of the pictures from the trip were out of the airplane window, or parking lots, or airports.

 This was my first time in Seattle.  The purpose of the trip was to visit the glass manufacturing plant.  The day we visited was the first day that they were going to produce our glass for this year's bottling.  It takes the plant 4 days to produce all the glass we need to bottle a vintage.  It then takes us 5 weeks to bottle it all.

 This picture reminds me of the shipping port in Oakland, but greener.

This is the parking lot of the glass plant.  Unfortunately all their processes are top secret so this is all you can see of the plant.  Without a hint of sarcasm or irony I can honestly say that it is the coolest work place I have ever been to and it was so frustrating to not be able to document it.

I snapped this picture of the process in the lobby.  The scale of this place, the giant piles of broken glass that glittered everywhere, the giant furnaces full of molten glass, the conveyor belts that stretched for miles.  It was really impressive.  Each furnace can make about 12,000 cases of glass a day.  This plant has 4 furnaces, but not all 4 are necessarily running at once.

After 3 hours touring the plant and a quick meeting to talk about quality, it was time for lunch.

We found this place, Morten's Steak House.  It made me feel like we were stepping onto a scene of Mad Men.

Also, there was meat.

A lot of meat.

This was a window in the airport gift shops.

And if the aerial pictures weren't enough, I wanted additional proof that I indeed visited Seattle (if only for a few hours).


-Lucia