harvest and crush, 2010

It's crush season. And harvest season. And pressing time.

The temperature is dropping, the days are getting shorter but the work hours just keep growing. This is the exciting time! This is so much work and so much fun all wrapped up into a ball of energy and exhaustion. I'm turning into this work-zombie where I just don't stop moving, even though I'm so tired. Between the park CSA wrapping up, the meat share getting in full swing, planting for the winter garden shares, and trying to get a chicken plucker working before the ducks are ready for the table, it's almost as if that's enough to totally fill my plate before even starting to think about the excitement of first crush, moving into the new production building, and harvesting the grapes and apples for the 2010 season.

Harvest round one came down last weekend. Started at 7am and with two different crews on two different days, we pulled down about 5 tons of grapes! The problem with harvesting wine grapes is that it's not just done when you pluck them from the vines. Within 24 hours they must be crushed and destemmed right away. The whites must then be pressed out into juice and the fermentation process begins.

The new production room is full of fresh wine smell and yeast blurps from the airlock on top of the Frontenac Gris tank. The Frontenac needs tended to several times a day and I'm trying to get together a crew to take off the netting, and harvest two days again and press on Saturday. Geez! I am completely going to make a bed in the rice hull loft at the winery.

The wine from last year has been tended by the wine doctor and turned into this smooth, amazingly beautiful finished product that's ready to be bottled any day now. Ohhhh man, it's good. I can't believe it came from our super acidic Frontenac grapes! I'd take it over a good Merlot any day. I hope that we have the same success with the batch of grapes from this year's hot, dry season. Only time will tell.

This whole thing seems like such a huge endeavor that I'm excited and scared at the same time. It's always something new and I am really looking forward to opening up the tasting room in a few months and letting you all try what we've made. What a feat of work has gone into it up until now and soon, you all will get to drink the fruits of our labor.

Cheers!

Bunch Close

Tomorrow is the first day of July. The Japanese beetles are out. The mosquitoes are terrible this year. The horse flies are still blood thirsty as ever. And the vigorous Marquettes are growing faster than I can pull them into the shape I want them.

I still watch the trains go by every day, whistles blowing deafeningly loud.



Time marches on in the season and now I'm organizing lists of tanks, pumps, mixers, hoses, and gaskets that we will need for 2010 crush. It's coming on us pretty fast. The grapes went from bloom to bunch close before I could even get pictures. Veriason is coming soon... this whole season has just been a flurry of working until I can't stand up - falling into a hard, exhausted sleep at night and then waking up to do it again. Oh, and some crappy fast food in the middle because I can't find the time to get to the grocery store to buy real food or cook dinner anymore. :( That's pretty pathetic. But otherwise, everything is good.

The next step is getting everything in order as far as tanks, presses, pumps, and grape crushing equipment. At the same time, we will be netting the grapes to keep the birds off. August was kinda slow last year and once a week, I'd go out and pick a representative sample of grapes from 3 different types to test sugar, pH and tannins. I think this year I'm going to be collecting ten different samples from 7 different types of grapes to see which ones are ripening the best and hoping that they aren't all ready at the same time.



Along with grapes, the cider is in the back of my mind as well. The late frost nipped almost all the blossoms off our apple trees, so now sourcing apples from other local orchards is in order. Nick has his cider recipe down except for the perilously high alcohol content combined with easy drinkability. It's really delicious, so much it might be dangerous.

We just tried another experimental blend with fresh pressed cherries - gorgeous in color and really smooth, slightly dry too. I'm excited to see what we brew this fall.

Alright, time for me to get back at the vines. It's 70 degrees and sunny out today, perfect weather for wrestling grapevines and looking forward to the cold hard cider waiting for me when I get home tonight.

new year... late june.

I have not updated since the end of last year, which might have left some of you on the edge of your seats like a cliffhanger of a tv series.
Well, like any good tv show, I'm back for another season of beating grapevines into the submission, battling bad bugs, and longingly listening to the trains go by.

I've seen my first Japanese beetle already. We've replanted about 600 vines. I'm caring for about 7 different varieties of grapes that are going to bear this year. It's pretty crazy.
I am happy though because I know more this year than I did last year, and I'm in a -take no prisoners- mode with the grapvines. I used to very gingerly prune them just so, but now that I know that pretty much nothing can kill them, I'm pruning hard, and stringing them up.

We're fighting weeds and fungus like crazy this year thanks to all of the early rains we had. My garden is looking pretty sad as it kept getting pummelled by rain whenever I would try to plant anything. We've only had light fungus pressure thanks to a well timed spray program and things have overall been going rather smoothly.


Now on to the hard part --- the winery.

It's hard to imagine how this whole endeavor is going to take shape. It's so hard to think about all the tons of grapes that will be pulled off the vine soon and need to be made into delicious wine.


Agh! So much work when I think about it. We'll see how it all goes. My camera went swimming while Jason and I were on a fishing trip, but I promise to post pics soon.

putting the Christmas tree up

So much has been happening in the past month, I'm so happy... but broke as always.

First off, Jason and I hit up the amish country wineries. We started out at Breitenbach, which if you see it from the highway, it's this giant gorgeous purple castle thing that just begs for you to stop.
We ordered an oven fired pizza and wandered around their massive gift shop. I snuck out back and pointed out every piece of machinery and rapid fire explained what each does and what I did in North Carolina and everything I learned. Their tours of the production room were $3 and we were waiting for our pizza so I didn't mind not seeing the inside. Their giant stainless steel tanks were outside, which is odd to me because it's so cold, but I think their production is higher than their space.

We taste tested their wines, a lot of whites and sweets and every fruit wine you can think of, including cranberry. Their merlot was good, their cabernet sauvingnon was accurate, but I liked the festival blend the best. They had a tiny new vineyard probably in its second year off to one side, with rolling hills and pastures out front.
It was ok, if not completely geared towards traveling tourists. The pizza was a bit disappointing and we had order envy from the fresh, hot paninis and big salads coming out all around us. $5 a glass got us small, not engraved glasses filled with wine which we sipped while in a rather full small indoor dining area with huge windows.

We left pretty happy and pleased with our Sunday afternoon, but walking around we saw a little cheese house up the street which we decided to check out.


It was Swiss Heritage Winery and Broad Run Cheese House, a quaint little building packed full of lace, old hollywood memorobilia, and cheese serving ladies wearing traditional dresses.

Their cheese was divine, with samples all over of their different chutneys and sauces and I loved that you could look behind the counter through a windowed door and see their production room with giant stainless steel vats with big stirring spoons on conveyor belts.

Oh, and their wine was amazing! All sourced from the Ohio grapes and fruits, they all had amazing character and flavors that were rich and complex. I couldn't tell if the guy pouring was also the winemaker, but he seemed to really like what he was doing.

We came home with a blend called Back to the 40s and many promises to go back when time and money allow.

Anyway, I am still processing what I learned from racking and bottling the last time I was in North Carolina and I'm really excited to start making wine. Maybe it's just the dormancy of everything that makes me think -what's the next step- but I am worried that my little 13 acres of soon to be highly productive vines will have no where to go to mature into beautiful wines. I am not very excited to go out into the fields and spend a ton of time and energy if I don't know where the grapes will be pressed.
I think I have been staring too much at the facebook of Gervasi Vineyards opening just up the street, where some rich dude wanted to make a winery and hell, he's doing it! His building jumped up with contractors and decorators and helpers all at his bidding. He has a wine logo and bottle designs and a beautiful crush pad and production house. And I am envious. I wish we had plans or a foundation or something I could put my hand on and say, yes this is happening. It just seems so far off right now.

Anyway, my cider is ready to be bottled now, which should be what we are doing tonight. I'm not going to clarify it. I am pretty behind with my holiday brew, but I should start tonight and maybe it will be ready in time for Christmas.
It's terribly cold here and getting colder. I smell of roadkill from petting a dog before my nose caught up with the aweful scent. Guess it's time for a shower.

Racking in NC

So I'm back down south and this morning the sunlight is pouring straight through the windows brilliantly. It's on the brink of tshirt weather and I have bruises appearing all over again from moving around big heavy things and being awkwardly coordinated. I really wish I could pick this place up and move it to Ohio, or pick up my little 14 acres and plop it down here. Books on tape get me through the car ride and I'm halfway through Plague of the Doves, which has me eagerly awaiting the ride home just to see what happens next. If I had the paper copy, I'd surely have torn through it already.

Anyway, I came down to help with racking, mixing and bottling. The first few days, I just danced around on top of hundreds of cases of wine, reorganizing and bungeeing them together. I have long lists of things to do so I made a pandora station all around Gil Mantera's Party Dream, which works as long as no one is around for the most part and I can dance and sing along. They keep throwing this sweet Swedish dance pop band that's my new fav, if I could only remember their name.
We started racking yesterday. Pretty much, I pump out the wine that's in the barrel, clean out the barrel, put the wine back in the barrel, and taste test the wine. There are hundreds of barrels. I keep thinking that my pallet is getting better but I'm still not sure about a lot of it, and there is no way that I could draw the wine from a barrel and tell you what type and year like Robert can. Oh, and so far, there is one barrel of a reserve merlot that is to die for. And I think I like Sangiovese.
Oh... and the Frontenac...... um, still has some work to be done yet to make it tone down a bit. It's a wine that you put in your mouth and it seems like it's screaming at you. The F. Gris is the same way. The Marquette is mellowing in oak and it should be pretty good. But all of them still have a long way to go.

Hmm, so today is more racking, more catered food, and more wine tastings. Life is good.

Smacked by Nothing

Oh my gosh. I'm back in Ohio. My goats and sheep were happy to see me. My little heeler pup is pretty mad and not talking to me right now.

I kinda feel like a freight train that just hit a brick wall. It was so much of a flurry of work and stress that was just building and building up to a 7 ton harvest and then crushing, crushing, crushing, and driving and learning and then BAM! Nothing.

Nothing is a weird feeling. I drove by my vines, dormant and ready for their winter sleep. I came home to black leaves of peppers in the gardens and the stupid turkeys ate my kale patch. My head is still spinning from all the stuff that I learned and I feel like I wrote down a lot but there's still so many more questions that are still rolling around in my brain but now there's no expert in front of me to make me laugh and tell me interesting facts about fermentation.

I can't help but think that I want to do it all over again. The learning curve just started and I was getting it down towards the end and then ... nothing.

My feet are cold here in Ohio and I'm listening to my new Pandora radio station and pacing around my house. I'm filling out paperwork to be a substitute teacher, but that's taking forever and the temp winter job market is pretty slim.

To add insult to the nothingness, I found a page for this budding vineyard just down the road with money to spare that is building a huge, amazing building with all their ducks in a row and everything in motion for a quick opening next year. Check out Gervasi Vineyards. Amazing. Wood fired pizzas and a bistro and winding stair cases, a nice big crush pad with all new equipment. So amazing.

Anyway, I'm adjusting priorities in my time off and trying to figure out what next year will bring. In the meantime, I'm fermenting hard cider, brewing my holiday beer, making as much music as I can, filling my freezer with veggies and meats from this year, picking up a brush again to paint crazy chicken paintings for Christmas presents, and finally sitting down and submitting some writing works to farm-type magazines about my crazy adventures in what I did, failed at, and did well this year.

This time of year is always hard, but I plan to keep my chin up and look forward to what is new and growing again in the spring.

North Carolina part 2

Day seven. Saturday 10/10/09 7:19pm

I’m all showered up and ready to go out to dinner with the family for Robert and Anna’s birthday. This week flew by in a flurry of work and wine and I was so glad when we were about halfway through crushing the last of the grapes but had to stop for dinner out. And I was so glad that I got invited to dinner too.

I still don’t think my sense of smell is fine tuned enough. I like when Robert tells me that something smells or when he says what he thinks about a wine and then I try it and try to put the words to what I taste and smell. Some things I get, but others I completely have no idea. We taste test the wines as they are fermenting, which is very difficult to see how they are going to turn out in the end as they settle but then again, I'm just starting so in about 20 years maybe I'll get it.


Day six. Friday. 12:48am

It was a cleaning and preparation day. It was the hospitality side of the winery business where we were preparing for an out of town pair of musicians so the first half of the day was all dishes and laundry and squeegeeing the floors of the barrel room. You know how hard it is to turn a workplace into a concert area? I had only one thing on my list from Robert to do and that was to transfer some wine from one barrel to another. I tried to do it around 2 but one barrel started to overflow, much to my dismay, spilling out all over the clean concert floor so I had to stop again and squeegee the floor really fast before anyone saw.
I miss my dog terribly today and everything about my home. I stared at the hens for awhile. Their combs are larger than my RIRs, a phenomenon I read about as a method to release heat in warmer climates so it was interesting to see it in action.

The band came for dinner and was very nice and pleasant as I set up banged and set up chairs all around them tuning. Natalie made an excellent dinner of pasta with kale and red peppers and pine nuts and good bread and squash soup. We were having a pleasant conversation about music when their old alternative rock band came up that Natalie and Robert played in the 90s and Natalie got super embarrassed by it, which of course led me to say –you think that’s embarrassing, I used to be in an all girl band with a transgendered person in the process of changing into a woman. *Insert confused looks, crickets chirping*

The concert turned out to be super nice and a very romantic setting and the few people who did come ended up liking it immensely. I was taken back by the pacing of the night being perfect, with the fiddle player holding the attention for awhile then shifting over to the guitarist who had a different style with finger picking baroque music with a new age twist. I remember one time when I was sick of all my music at my house and I went down to the library and thought that celtic music would transcend into some other form of auditory experience completely new to me. The old cd’s I found there were not bad, but nothing compared to a fiddle player surrounded by French oak barrels with fermenting wine playing his heart out and stomping on a stomp block, smiling the whole time.
And yes, I ended up spending the last part of the cash that I didn’t’ blow at the little bistro on one of his cd’s. Sooo excited to play it on the way home… to see my dog, my sheep, and my sweet boy waiting for me.


Tomorrow, early morning and all day crush!