Harvest 2009

We all know the sure signs of fall - the leaves start to turn brilliant red and gold, there's a crisp chill in the air, the beautiful harvest moon seems to hang in the sky all night, and you just can't get the purple stains off of your fingers. Well, that last one is certainly the case here in Oregon wine country. After a few real hot spells during the summer, the end of the growing season shaped up very nicely. We had a little rain in late September, but not enough to adversely affect the grape crop.

Harvest started early in central Washington, and like last year I got 100 lbs of Merlot grapes from the Tri Cities area in the Columbia Valley. The fruit looked good, but the acid was a little low, so we added some during crushing. While the wine pretty much made itself last year, it's looking like I'm going to need to develop a little more skill as a wine maker this year. I got the grapes home and made a yeast starter. That night the starter was foaming nicely and I added it to the must. Fermentation got going in earnest about 18 hours later.

A week later we started harvesting at Purple Cow Vineyards. Faithful readers will recall that I've had the good fortune to work with Jon and the other great folks at PC in various capacities over the past few years. On Sept. 27th we harvested a couple tons of Pinot Noir, and smaller quantities of Marachal Foch and Tempranillo. Jon and Galo have been making incredible Tempranillo from California grapes for several years, and are on the verge of having enough estate fruit to make an Oregon Tempranillo. Can't wait! After harvesting the grapes, we take them about 20o yards across the road to Apolloni Winery where Jon makes his wine. Cheryl and I went over to the winery a little early to help set things up. This included making sure the equipment was clean, positioning the crusher/de-stemmer under the sorting table, getting fermenting bins sanitized and ready, and a variety of other jobs.

Once everything was setup, we climbed up onto the sorting table and the fruit was dumped into one end. Now the sorting table isn't really a table, but a 10 foot conveyor belt mounted about 9 feet in the air with platforms along both sides where people stand and inspect the fruit as it goes by. We're looking for leaves, bugs, green berries, moldy clusters, etc. Basically, if we don't want it in the wine, we pick it off the belt. At the end of the belt, the fruit falls into the crusher/de-stemmer. This is a rotating drum with counter-rotating fingers in the middle that strip the berries off of the stems while gently breaking open the skin of the fruit. The drum has many holes that the grapes fall through, while the now empty stems come out the end of the drum. The grapes then fall into a big plastic bin where they will spend a week or 2 fermenting. Depending on the wine and the winemaker, several chemicals are added to the must (that's what the grapes and juice are now called) such as potassium metabisulfite to kill off undesirable yeasts, bacteria, etc., enzymes to break down the grapes, acid, and/or yeast food. The bins are then covered and set aside for a period of time before yeast is added.

Earlier that same day that I was at Purple Cow, Rachel and Tim drove into Hillsboro to pick up 100 lbs of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes for me, again from central Washington. So, when I got back from Purple Cow that night, I had to deal with my own grapes. The acid level was good, but the sugar level was a little high. This requires dilution, but if you just add water, you'll drop the acid level, so I had to add a little tartaric acid to the water to bring the sugar level down without messing up the acid. I had already made my yeast starter before leaving for the vineyard in the morning, so I was able to add it that night, and again, fermentation got started about 18 hours later.

During the fermentation of red wines, the grape skins form a cap over the top and rise up above the liquid. This cap needs to be "punched down" or pushed back into the liquid at least twice a day. Big wineries use something that looks like a large toilet plunger, but I use the back of a plastic serving spoon. About 2 days into fermentation of the Cab, I started to get slight whiffs of rotten egg smell. Jon says that you can pretty much know exactly how your fermentation is going just be smelling. This rotten egg smell may have been the beginning of a hydrogen sulfide problem usually caused by a combination of sulfur on the grapes and not enough nitrogen for the yeast. I added some DAP (a yeast nutrient) at that point and the smell quickly went away.

Once fermentation has reduced the sugar to about 2% or less, the grapes must be pressed to extract the juice from the skins and pulp. The Merlot was ready first, and the Cab about a week later. This involves scooping the juice along with the skins and pulp out of the plastic fermenter and putting it into a wine press. The juice is collected and poured into glass carboys to finish fermenting. Tim and Rachel helped with the Merlot, and Josh and Tim helped with the Cab, and I now have 3 carboys of wine slowly bubbling away in the winery (aka darkroom).

Meanwhile, back at Purple Cow, we harvested Muscat on Oct. 4th. Many of you have probably had a sweet desert wine made from the Muscat grape, but Jon makes a wonderfully crisp dry Muscat. This is one grape variety that tastes like nothing else. You know a Muscat grape when you taste it, and the wine tastes just like the grape. After harvesting a couple of tons of grapes, they were hauled over to the winery again. However, unlike red wine which is fermented on the skins, grapes for white wine are loaded immediately into a press where the juice is extracted and pumped into a closed tank. Yeast is then added to the tank and fermentation proceeds. The press we used looks like a big metal cylindrical tank lying on its side. The tank is prodigiously perforated to allow the juice to escape. There are doors along the top through which the grapes are loaded and a large inflatable bladder in the middle. Once the grapes are in, the doors are closed and air is pumped into the bladder. This squishes the grapes against the tank, and causes the juice to go through the holes. There's a big trough below the tank which catches the juice. It looks like a grape juice waterfall coming off the tank and into the trough, and it smells incredible! From there the juice is pumped into the fermenting tank.

Pressing white wine takes a long time because after you're done with the first press, you deflate the bladder and rotate the drum to re-distribute the grapes. You then re-inflate the bladder to get more juice. We did this about 5 times to squeeze out every bit of juice that we could. I think Jon was estimating about 250 gallons, but we ended up with nearly 300 - not bad!

The next Friday (Oct 9th) Rachel and I worked at Kramer Vineyards in the afternoon. I attended a few phone meetings from home in the morning, then we headed up to the vineyard. They had been harvesting Pinot Noir all morning and had picked about 7 tons. Rachel and I worked the sorting table for probably close to 5 hours (not counting a lunch break). Unfortunately we had to leave a little early to get Tim from the pool after swim practice. It was great fun as usual. Keith and Trudy's daughter, Kim, recently completed the winemaking program at Chemeketa, and it was fascinating to listen to Kim and Trudy discuss various aspects of winemaking during the course of the day.

The next day (Saturday) was the final day of Harvest at Purple Cow. We had already harvested everything except the Dijon 60 Pinot Noir which just wasn't quite ready on our other harvest days. Now it was finally ripe and ready to bring in. We had a good sized crew (maybe 10 people) and the work went fairly quickly. At around 11:00, Jon mentioned that Alfredo and his crew could use a little help over at the winery, so Doug and I headed over to see what we could do. Chuck put me to work moving barrels and Anne had Doug pump out the fermented must from the red wines that were ready to press. We then helped with crushing of some of the Apolloni fruit (I weighed out the chemicals and added them along with dry ice as the crushed grapes fell into the fermenter), and also helped with the pressing of the reds after we'd gotten most of the liquid pumped out. It was great fun, and I learned a lot as usual. Unfortunately, the forklift was having problems, which delayed things quite a bit (you need the forklift to load grapes onto the sorting line and into the press). First, the alternator died. Fortunately, one of the volunteers on the Apolloni crew was a mechanic, so after a quick trip to the local auto parts store, they had that fixed. Later, however, a hydrolic line broke so that the forklift could not tilt. This was a bigger problem, and took the better part of 2 hours to get fixed. During that time, we all did whatever odd jobs needed to be done around the winery under Chuck and Anne's direction.

Finally, around 5:00pm or so, we were ready to do the Purple Cow pinot that we'd picked in the morning. By this time, most of our picking crew had gone home, but the Apolloni volunteers were more than happy to stay and help. We finished ours and did a few more bins of Alfredo's, when he decided that they could finish in the morning and sent us all home. It was almost a 12 hour day and I was sore and tired, but very happy. I really enjoy my time in the vineyard and the winery, and as long as I keep learning, it stays interesting.

Finally, I just picked up the last of my own grapes this morning - 100 lbs of Sangiovese. These have been crushed and are waiting to have the yeast added tonight. I'll probably follow up with another post as these grapes go through the process.

It's been a great harvest, and I'm looking forward to following this wine through the various stages over the next year or so.