North Carolina part 1

It's been a few days since the interweb, so here's my little journal I've been keeping about my time in beautiful red-dirted NC

Day five. Thursday 10/08/09 6:52pm

I’m sitting at a little bisto eating a turkey something or other and drinking a microbrew oatmeal porter with THE INTERNET! They have it at the winery but I haven’t had the chance to ask the password and I’m moving out tomo morning to make room for the out of town bands. I’m staying with Chad and Lisa then and somewhere around midnight last night with the getting rid of the pesky roosters and working well past midnight, Robert asked me if I’d stay on and work through BluesFest this weekend. With a temp job waiting for me at the end of my visit, of course I happily obliged as despite a really really long day, I do like it here and the work is satisfying for the most part. The winery was open today and I actually did see a woman come in with a cardigan tied around her shoulders like Zach in saved by the bell or that one Heather in the movie Heathers. I just hid among the barrels and tried not to laugh.

I can’t help but think that there is a notable difference between the wineries in Ohio I’ve been to and this one in North Carolina. I haven’t had a chance to visit other ones around here, but the one in Virginia was the same way. It just has a different aura to it, I think possibly because the Ohio wineries are more like glorified bars where people are loud and boisterous with tons of tables and chair strewn around and a dude working behind the counter that’s been working outside all day and then just pours wine at night. Ohio has a lot more rustic wood-feeling places. The southern places are more marble and fine linen. Not sure why, but I’m sure it’s the clientele and perhaps the area too.

I had a brochure for the area with a few things starred that I wanted to do while in the area, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. There’s a barrel room concert tomorrow night with out of town musician guests to prepare for and a whole weekend of music and wine coming upon us fast. I just can’t believe it’s Thursday already. My how time flies….

Day four. Wednesday 10/07/09 1:46AM!!!!!

It’s well past one in the morning. I’ve been working since 9am. I have no idea how many hours straight that is. Everything is funny to me. I got a little bored at 4, but kept working, not realizing that we’d press out all the Frontenac and it would take us from 6ish to past midnight.

I killed chickens today. Funny how some things just follow you no matter where you go.

Day three. Tuesday 10/06/09 4:42pm

Today started out with farm fresh eggs from the hens cooing outside the kitchen window. It is raining again, but that’s ok. It’s still tshirt weather and when I see the roof over the concrete slab that we keep working under, I just keep thinking – this would never work in Ohio. I am constantly doused with water or wine or a combination of both and while my waterproof snow boots might seem a bit excessive here, they would be a necessity in the north.

After my onion omlette, we dove right in to wine making, moving the Frontenac gris from one tank and then back again, sans the gunk at the bottom that settled over the past few days. We moved the Niagara that was in the giant stainless steel tank over to another giant stainless steel tank, but there was a bunch of gunk in the bottom so… up the ladder and into the giant tank I went with a little light and a bucket of oxyclean. Seriously that stuff works so well. Cleans anything.

I have been really busy and I had to force myself to stop to take a little break for a few hours before Robert gets off work at 6:30. I think I’m learning a lot… mostly that making wine takes a lot of manual labor and a ton of scrubbing. Still fun though, I think. The ironic part of it all is that I’m so whupped by the end of the day and sick from smelling musty wine all day that I can’t even drink the stuff. It’s soooo much work. Weird.

Day two. Monday 10/05/09 8:57pm

It was seven before I got out of the cellar and collapsed on my bed. I can feel my heart beat in my feet from the concrete… no rhyming intended. Yesterday was much more hectic, long, and like a ton of grapes almost getting poured on my head. Today was more like punching down the must, where I push through the mass of crushed grapes in giant bins with a giant stainless steel plunger thing. We moved around a lot of gray bins with reds in various degrees of fermentation while the faint odor similar to things that belong in a cat box wafts up from the different bins.

We pressed the Marquette’s, which only amounted to about half of a flex tank. We sifted and transferred and sifted and transferred the Frontenac Gris, which filled a full flex tank. Then we transferred the Niagara from one giant stainless steel tank to another, which is a task where you have to take into account gravity, pressure, and trying not to let air touch it. Yeah, that’s kinda tough as pumps have a tendency to suck air while you’re waiting for that last little bit of juice to come out of the tank. The whole time I’m working with whites in the fermentation process, I’m thinking about how that movie is so full of shit if they portray characters with the ability to allow zero air to touch their chardonnay. That’s stinking nuts. Minimal I can see, maybe. But zero air? Yeah right. If you would even try for that, there would be so much waste as you’re trying to bleed the pumps, or maybe they just fermented while the pumps are still hooked up in some kind of closed system? I don’t know. I did learn that you can have wine on tap and Robert says it’s not bad as long as you have it in a sealed bladder bag similar to the inside of a box of wine. Maybe that’s how they didn’t let air touch it… a giant bladder bag? I don’t know. Seems weird, even for a perfectionist.

Anyway, I had a very lovely day, which started out a bit rainy but I got a super nice breakfast at a local bistro and I learned all about agro-chemicals. Well, maybe not all about them, but I learned a few things like how they establish re-entry time and that roundup starts degrading as soon as it hits the soil and that it works similarly to an amino acid and that there’s an additive in cigarettes to make them burn longer than straight tobacco normally would. Robert also told me that red wine benefits from oxygen while it’s the enemy to white wine. And that you let red wine sit on the skins to ferment to add color, and Frontenac is certainly not lacking in color so it shouldn’t need as long. Oh, and Frontenac stains your shirts blue because it has the red stain color in an acidic environment but once you add water the chemistry becomes more basic and it turns blue, which kinda reminds me of a pregnancy test… except that I can’t get it out of my favorite lucky chicken shirt now.

Oh, and they have chickens here too; wyandottes, reds, polishes, and a frizzle among others. The fridge is so full of eggs it looks like quiche time at my house. Between the chickens and the cool looking cat, I’m not too terribly homesick for the farm yet. I just hope my little screwy sensitive dog doesn’t fall apart while I’m gone. I miss that little mess.

Day 1. Sunday 10/04/09 10:49pm

After two days of tough picking, rain and shine, I hit the road at 8pm. Armed with a book one tape, Tomtom – my fav little gps, and a bunch of soda, I was pretty dead set on making NC at 4 in the morning if it killed me…. … but then when I thought about it, the latter was actually more of a possibility. My dad insisted on calling in one of his earned free nights at a Holiday Inn and I was too tired to object. I drove almost all the way through west VA before I hit Princeton, a little town almost on the border with only two hours left to go. I rolled in around 2 and was completely exhausted, but with my head on the pillow, my eyes just wouldn’t shut. Fueled by the same bunch of soda that got me there, I just couldn’t shut my brain off. So I flipped through the crappy tv programming that all late Saturday night insomniacs are subjected to for about an hour before the history channel doing a special on the civil war finally lulled me to sleep.

The next morning I was still pretty delirious, but grateful for a hot shower and some breakfast. I can’t imagine how crappy I would feel without that little pit stop.

I got to the winery around 11 and the truck with the grapes was set an hour behind me. It was good because we had some preparations to do first. So we sanitized the flex tanks and set up the crushing table to take the tons of Frontenac that were headed its way. I had that feeling like someone’s hands were cupped over my ears and I kept making everyone repeat what they just said. Chad could only stay until 4pm, but Lisa brought her friend Elaine who was a tremendous help.

Robert who owns and runs the winery is super friendly and really likeable. Not sure what to expect from crush, he was laid back enough to make us feel comfortable, but not so much that we didn’t know what to do.

This place smells funny. I’m not sure exactly how to describe it, just funny. Almost like mucking out a horse stall, but if a dog had been in a stall for awhile on wood chips. I keep thinking I stepped in cat poop, but I don’t find any on my shoe.

Speaking of cats, the winery cat is the most beautiful cat I’ve ever seen. His name is Noah and he’s a Bengal cat. For real. I’ve seen them in magazines, but this cat is so beautiful in real life. He’s very sweet and friendly, but his markings are very unique and defined. He’s a little larger than your ordinary cat, but not much. It’s just this very bright and striking kind of orange that’s just mesmerizing. And he’s very talkative too.

Anyway, we got the Frontenac Gris crushed and pressed. It starts out a white wine color, a bit on the green side, but then towards the end of pressing, it started bleeding a pink color once the skins were really getting crushed down. Man, Ohio grape growers just can’t catch a break.

The Frontenac was crushed and put into 4 giant gray bins to ferment. It’s a lot of Frontenacs. A lot. I hope Robert can coax them into actually tasting good as wine. He keeps saying that they have good color, but the juice is so acidic it’s hard not to pucker a bit after tasting.

Oh well, it’s ohio and we have to take what we can get….. now it’s def beyond time for me to get some sleep