GARAGE VINO

These grapes are so dark my hands look like I’ve shifted careers and become an auto mechanic. For days, my hands look this way. All from one night of pressing. This is going to be one good vintage of Central Coast Sangiovese.

I keep learning that winemaking, maybe anything you like doing, is really about the time you spend doing it with other people. Last year, Dave Wheaton loaned me everything and we spent a couple hours pressing my quarter-ton of Zin with his candy-apple-red press, whole clusters and all.

This year, who better to have in town for the physical help and spiritual companionship than my own dad. We squeezed the wine out of the fermented Sangiovese, staining our hands, feet, tools, and concrete patio as, bucket by bucket, we transferred the precious wine out of the big half-ton fermentation bin, into my new press (now stained purple thanks to Bob Modie’s amazing Sangiovese fruit), and ultimately into my equally new stainless steel 79-gallon tank. Seems like about 55 gallons, all told, at least if I can judge by the depth to which we’ve filled the tank.

Think I showed the courage to go three days of extended maceration. Armed with my CO2 gas tank, I knew I could go at least a couple days, making up for the fact that there wasn’t any cold soak to speak of.

Inoculated three weeks later with ML culture and “Leucofood,” which feeds the ML bacteria. Doesn’t seem to be resulting in anything yet other than sleeping wine.

Thanks, Dad — couldn’t have pressed this stuff off alone…and there’s no better time than a nighttime press with your father over a couple of beers. Amazing what you talk about, the things you catch up on, as you crank the Italian pressing machinery under the lights and have nothing better or worse to do than watch the wine trickle down from the skins and pour into the transfer bucket.

Ready, a mere two years from now, to be consumed!

Bob Blamire helped me clean bins. I felt as though I nearly owed him my life at this point. I do like cleaning those things — you know how clean you get ‘em if you do ‘em yourself — but I now understand why Dave Yates, assistant winemaker at Jaffurs, offered me a few bottles of wine last year during my harvest-slave month: it’s quite a luxury to be relieved of your bin-cleaning duties when you’re used to shouldering most of that load yourself. Even at my scale.

Soccer practices and a few other things held us up for a minute — the grapes keeping cool in their half-ton bin in the back of the truck, parked in my driveway (neighbors wondering, are the Staegers moving already? Just got here a year ago)…and getting grapes from the bin, through the garage, and to the only place where I could operate the crusher-destemmer, proved a major endeavor.

I need a space to make this wine for real — that, I assure you, I will have by next year.

But then the hand-cranking crush began…and people started showing up from all corners of our ‘hood. Good thing too — I swear I had a crew four times the size of the professional, paid gang working their way through 7 tons a day on some mornings last year at Jaffurs, and still it took us a good four, five hours and then some.
The crusher-destemmer worked pretty well. The grapes were ripe and gently affixed to the stems, and so there were some pieces of stem in the must and we did our best to pluck them out (another trick learned as harvest slave last year). I sulfited, about half what is typically recommended — I did a quarter teaspoon per 7-8 gallons instead of a half-teaspoon every 5 gallons as many suggest. I remember Craig Jaffurs not using any last year — he hates the stuff — just sprays a slight sulfite solution, and not much of it, on the surface of the bins as he puts them into cold storage. Working at home, giving the neighborhood kids a chance to stomp some of the grapes…I needed a little insurance and so I made sure to get a decent dose of sulfites in there.

The size, height, and nature of the crusher-destemmer, and I’m talking both the input and output side of it, just didn’t really work for any type of efficiency. The top was high enough so we had to pour grapes in from above, in food-grade trash-bin loads small enough to prevent us from dislocating a shoulder for the hoist. No forklift on my back patio… and the chute was too low for anything but a 5 or 10 gallon bucket to take the must into. This worked fine in the end — transferred from the bucketloads into the sterilized extra 4×4 half-ton bin Bob Modie had loaned me, keeping it covered with a plastic sheet and bungee cord just the way I’d learned as harvest slave last year.

Bucket by bucket, crank by crank, pitchforkful by pitchforkful, we got the 900 pounds of grapes destemmed, partially crushed (probably should have figured out the adjustment facets of the crusher in advance, but I didn’t, so plenty of the berries remained whole; again something notable from last year’s lessons was that Jaffurs had removed the crusher part of his crusher-destemmer and so I take it that, at least for Syrah, the way my little Ferrari of a hand-cranker machine worked was actually the best-adjusted setting in terms of degree of crushing)…out of the picking bin and into the fermentation bin.

Along the way, every kid got two long stretches of stomping in his or her own bin. What a blast — and what a tradition. We all felt as though we were in Tuscany, making the wine for the neighborhood for years to come…which, obviously, we were, except for the Tuscany part. Though the weather’s not so different there…

Somewhere along the way I ate a piece of pizza or two, and tasted some decent wine Nadine bought for the occasion. We even barrel-tasted my 2007 Zinfandel (French oak barrel — great; American barrel — not too far along and too “fakey oakey”), and I finally did get around to testing the Brix on the Sangiovese - 26.5. Pretty high — and pretty good. While I had neglected to buy the ph- and acid-testing equipment I will eventually stock on my garagevino shelves, I was told that Ariel, with the same grapes, tested between 3.4 and 3.6 ph depending on location (some hillside/top, some flat down near the bottom of hill). Good enough for me this time around. We’ll average mine out around 3.5 for this season’s winemaking reference. Want to let the grapes speak for themselves anyway, unless things taste totally off at some point.

Darkness arrived, bedtime for the kids came too, and at long last we had one empty bin and one ¾ full of must. Smelling delicious and looking ruby purple the way only red winegrape must does. The last of my comrades headed home, I cleaned, covered, and gassed (CO2) the fermentation bin, hosed things off, hid the two trash bins of stems behind the garage, then considered going to bed before realizing that since I wasn’t doing a cold soak — too big of a bin for me to keep cold with ice bags and a blanket — it was time to get the yeast going.

Mixed up a couple containers worth (you have to rehydrate the yeast in warm water, adding some nutrient mix like “Go-Ferm” and let it sit for 15 minutes) then dug some holes in the must and got a pair of patches started for the night. Closed things up, went to sleep, got up early and mixed the two starter spots around a little before going to work, then came back that night to discover the fermentation was already getting warmed up and moving right along.

Final challenge that arose, kind of a disappointing one for me: I started the fermentation late Wednesday night September 10, and had a business trip that would take me out of town from the 14th through the 18th. Greg Schlosser, neighbor and mensch, along with Bob Blamire, came through in the clutch and kept the two-a-day punchdowns going, handling it perfectly after the one afternoon of instruction I offered just before heading to the airport on Sunday. Sterilize the punch-down tool, mix in some “Superfood/DAP” powder to keep the fermentation going and reduce the potential for off odors from the sulfur on the skins of the grapes, pull off the plastic sheet, punch down the whole bin in some systematic way, rinse off the tool, wipe down the sides of the bin with a vodka-soaked rag, replace the sheet, and, early on, provide a little shot of gas just in case. Didn’t even need the gas by Sunday — put your head down close to the grapes and sniff, and you’ll understand why added CO2 just wasn’t necessary. Your nose hairs curl, your brain freezes up like you’ve got a Slurpee headache, and you know quite well how little oxygen exists on the surface of those grapes.

Now I’m back, and I had the pleasure of my first punchdown in four days, a mere 30 minutes after pulling into the driveway from the airport. Things are still going strong in there, getting juicier by the moment, or winier, I should say, but CO2 is still in effect and the grapes are warm and fermenting still, here on day 8. Longer the better — more gentle, more flavors extracted.

I’m planning to do with extended maceration what I couldn’t do with cold soaking — give it a few days on the skins once the primary fermentation is, well, primarily over. I’ve got my CO2 gas gun so I should be able to keep air off of the surface of those suckers for a week following completion of primary.

Then we’ll put my new press to use and my kids will know not only how to crush red wine grapes, how to punch down the cap, to clean a winery facility before and after…but how to press the fresh wine off the skins and move that young stuff into the tank.

Extended maceration and press, coming up in seven days or thereabouts.

Thus ends the Crush in the Hood 2008 — at least until the Syrah and Nebbiolo I’m seeking is ready to harvest and I try the whole process all over again with slightly smaller lots! Or maybe just the same size all over again…?

Bob Modie has grown his grapes carefully and done it himself. Guy’s sort of living my dream. 3-1/2 acre vineyard, planted in 2004, organically farmed, small crop last year, first full harvest this year. He shoot-thins, drops clusters, keeps the nets over the rows when the grapes are ripe enough to attract birds. His vineyard’s at the top and downslope of a hill, facing southwest, and to my semi-trained eye the soils look like sandy, loamy, limestone-ridden Bordeaux-esque earth. Can’t attest to the organic matter inside the stuff, but things looked to me, up on that hill, like water wouldn’t stick around long in that soil and the vines would struggle and strain to pump out the fruit. He let me take a close look at the vines and the fruit his crews were plucking from them, and the vines were healthy, the grapes fairly tightly bunched for Sangiovese, the clusters medium-sized, the grapes almost as small as blueberries. Mmeaning more skin vs. grape flesh, so more tannins and flavor. Sangiovese is known for a fairly thin skin so smaller grapes might lead to a bolder, more intense single-varietal wine without as much need to blend with Cab or Syrah to give it the robustness Sangiovese can lack.

It’s a cool morning and the clouds keep it cool while the half-ton bins of grapes come into Bob’s driveway two-by-two, aboard a trailer the harvest crew is picking and dumping into. I’m fortunate to be joined in my desire for Bob’s grapes with one of the premier winemakers in Santa Barbara county — turns out Ariel Lavie, owner-winemaker (along with his wife Angela) of La Vie Vineyards in Lompoc is there taking all of Bob’s fruit that I don’t. If this guy has chosen this fruit? I’m in luck. Stumbled across the right vineyard is what that means.

The first four bins get weighed on Bob’s new scale and head up onto Ariel’s truck. My bin totals out at 900 lbs., even with the grapes mounded as high as they’ll go. Ariel is running Bob’s forklift this morning — he’s an old cellar pro and could steer a forklift through a maze of grandma’s china in his sleep. He gets my bin into the back of my U-Haul truck, the grapes still cold from the chilly night, and Bob loans me a second bin to crush the grapes into — a bin I’ll also use for primary fermentation.

Then my neighbor, pal, and dad of my daughter’s best friend, Bob Blamire and I hit the road, slightly reticent and full of guilt for leaving one of the area’s top winemakers behind as the sun begins pounding down on the hillside (and the grapes on Ariel’s truck). I tell myself he knows what he’s doing — plus, he’s got a shorter drive than we do, let alone less prep time before the crush once the grapes arrive at his winery.

Guilt aside, my grapes are shielded from the hot Paso sun that by now has made its way through the cloud cover — the back of the truck keeps cool until we cross over the mountain range north of Pismo Beach and the marine layer welcomes us with noonish temperatures in the seventies.

Couple stops at stores to procure some things I’d forgotten I need (that happens, it seems, even to the old pros, not that I am one — you only do this once a year, so you forget some of the things you had down pat, after a few tons of crushing, eleven months ago, and seemingly need to learn the annual process all over again). After these stops I’m ready to test out my new crusher-destemmer.

This time, unlike last year, it won’t just be me, my dad, and a couple of squishes from my kids — seems my wife, who has a passion for family traditions (including the new ones we’ve established here in Paradise, AKA Santa Barbara), has, in the span of a few hours, managed to create an annual event that you can go ahead and call unexpected in a beachfront city community: the First Annual Mesa Neighborhood Crush!

AKA The Crush In The Hood.

Turns out I’d need the help…since, as I began this three-part tale, 900 lbs. of grapes is one hell of a load if you’re crushing and destemming the things with a hand-crank Italian device meant for a quarter of that quantity. Plus, I had to assemble the stand myself without the aid of instructions, and after a few cranks it would prove particularly wobbly.

And so, accompanied by more than few parents, a gang of kids, and my best Mesa pals — the wine and beer and lemonade flowing, the pizzas arrived and, following the Jaffurs-trained cellar-master/harvest-slave sterilization stage…the crush was ready to begin. Destined, perhaps, to take us on into the night…

Next…Part III of “The Crush in the Hood”!

Taking a quick break from the saga of my 2007 home-vintage Zinfandel, I thought it prudent to post a couple of great photos Craig Jaffurs sent at the tail end of harvest at his winery.

This first was taken of me during some intense destemming work at Jaffurs on a heavy Syrah-delivery day…a photo that pretty much encapsulates all that my apprenticeship has been about: grape skins, juice, fatigue, thrill, and grins.

The second is a suitable replacement for the utter-crap, out-of-focus shot I snapped of Craig, Dave, and Matt inside the winery (no need for you to scroll down if you haven’t seen my bad picture). It was all I had, so I posted it. This, however, is more of an official shot of the Jaffurs Wine Cellars 2007 Harvest Crew.

From left to right, Nick, Dave, Matt, Chris, Craig, Larry, and yours truly.

Next: back to the Zin-making adventure, with inoculation and fermentation on deck.

After reading a few accounts on how best to extract flavors from Zinfandel grapes, I decided that crushing (in this case, by foot-stomping), then cold-soaking on the stems for 3 days, followed by primary fermentation to dryness then pressing off (without any extended maceration due to concerns about oxygen exposure control issues in my little home operation) would be the way to go.

As one article I read indicated, winemakers tend to decide between cold-soaking (where either crushed & destemmed, crushed, or destemmed bins of grapes are stored prior to fermentation for anything from 2 days to 1 week or longer to let the skins break down without the astringency of alcohol) OR extended maceration (where, at the conclusion of primary fermentation, you let the must soak for up to two weeks or longer to extract tannins from the broken-down skins and further break down the skins for greater flavor extraction during the press)…but not both. I’m not sure why one, but not both techniques, would be used – the best I could come up with in hunting this answer down was that you’d get too much extraction by doing both. But unless you’re dealing with thick-skinned varietals like Cabernet, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want as much extraction as you can get. Nonetheless, this is my first effort, so I’ve decided to go for significant extraction but to err on the side of being conservative if I am to err at all.

And to help me decide on which version of extra extraction to pursue, I found enough accounts by winemakers, even at major wineries, on how extended maceration can sometimes fail, in that if you do not maintain an adequate layer of carbon dioxide covering your must, that evil element of oxygen could ruin part or all of your wine before you even press it. Immediately following primary fermentation, I know from my work at Jaffurs that the must continues to exude CO2 – try sticking your head down near the surface and breathing through your nose, and you feel your nose-hairs curl and your head wants to explode. That’s the CO2 and its resultant lack of oxygen causing your oxygen-intake mechanisms to freak out. However, as each day passes following completion of primary fermentation, less CO2 is put off by the must, and you “must” (get it?) then provide doses of CO2 atop the must yourself, whether by gassing it with a CO2 tank and hose, or utilizing dry ice. The fog you see from dry ice as it “melts” is CO2. Anyway, long story short, many commercial winemakers have begun to feel, in this era where consistency seems to be a supreme goal in their world, that not enough control over oxygen exposure can be maintained as extended maceration stretches out past a few days.

Although I don’t care so much about consistency as quality and complexity, one of the biggest issues home or first-time winemakers apparently face is spoilage (I don’t even like writing that word), possibly due to lack of knowledge on how to maintain control over numerous variables, possibly due to poor sanitation measures, or just from foolish mistakes…either way, if I am going to add some extraction elements to really get at the flavors in my Zinfandel without going overboard, then I am going to make the more controlled choice – cold soaking, rather than extended maceration. (By the way, there are some other extraction techniques too, such as the use of enzymes during fermentation which help break down the skins for both color and flavor extraction. But I need to make sure I do a good job with this first effort, so again, one extra-extraction element is plenty for the first go-round.)

THE CRUSH

So, as covered in “Chapter 1,” due to a lack of thinking ahead, I was able to make the excellent, advanced, fine-winemaking decision of not destemming. Around six p.m., while the fading summer light still aided us on my “crush pad” (concrete patio behind my garage), I got all the buckets and “crush bins” and so on sterilized, created a sterilizing “foot bath” for my army of crushers (my kids) to step into before stomping on batches of grapes, and laid out a series of towels and patches of plastic and bins and buckets to form my little crushing production line.

In the next of the winemaking decisions, I elected to go semi-conservative on sulfite additions during the crush. The “UC Davis” philosophy, as some call it, is to utilize 50 parts per million of sulfur dioxide applied to the grapes during the crush. This kills or inhibits any “wild” or “natural” yeasts, preventing any uncontrolled or unwanted fermentations to take place before you’re ready with your “controlled” fermentation and a yeast of your choosing.

Many premium winemakers, or small-lot winemakers, do not sulfite at the crush stage. At Jaffurs, for example, in a fairly common technique among small-lot, artisan winemakers, only a few spritzes of a highly watered down sulfur solution is sprayed on the top of the must prior to the cold-soak – just to keep any molding or other spoilage from occurring to the top of the must. The idea being the general body of the must is all one big unified mush that is not exposed to oxygen or other elements. Some winemakers prefer to allow the wild yeasts to get involved, sometimes along with other, intended inoculations. The premium winemaking philosophy tending to be a more natural approach, or at least one that does not reduce the flavor additions naturally provided by the grapes by over-controlling sterilization measures.

So anyway, I decided to fend off errors and spoilage with a partial, or reduced sulfite addition. By my calculations, to reach 50 ppm, I’d need to add 2.5 to 3 teaspoons per 200 lbs of grapes/must. I had a quarter-ton, or 500 lbs., so I decided to go with 2.5 teaspoons total for the entire batch. About half the common sulfite addition…no need to overdo it but I don’t want any fermentation going on before my cold-soak stage has concluded. One could argue that in keeping the grapes cool enough for the cold-soak, fermentation can’t begin anyway…but again I am making sure to fend off error as well as focus on quality and complexity this first time through.

Then it was time to release the hounds! Send the crush-troops out to do their stomping work. Here they are: crush troop captains Sophie and Brick, with support from the private, Tallulah, held by field general Nadine. There was even help from a NATO ally, my father (AKA “Hampa”), and I got some steps in myself (little feet on little bodies don’t squish those grapes all that thoroughly, it turns out).

You might wonder about the question of sterility issues when it comes to foot-stomping. I did too and researched this. These days any commercial-winery foot-stomping is normally done with sterilized boots being worn by the stompers. It just keeps out any unwanted stuff. Without boots handy, I did the next best thing and “sterilized” my stompers’ feet with the sulfur solution I’d used to clean the bins, having them step into this “bath” before stomping each batch.

Also, good wine, even great wine was made for many, many generations before commercial crushers and even rubber boots were made. So I’m not panicky over this. Old-fashioned tends to be best in winemaking, it seems, at least when accompanied by some modern control/sterilization measures. (Also, the alcohol generated by the yeast, particularly once it reaches a percentage higher than 12-13%, pretty much kills off all unwanted stuff you might have brought to the table by being a bit too old-fashioned.)

My dad and I plucked a few buckets of stems out of the crushed must, so in this fashion I did a partial destemming. By the time the stomping and my poor-man’s destemming wrapped up around 8 p.m., I was left with two bins of must: about 40 gallons worth in the bin I decided to call “Z1,” and 30 gallons in “Z2.”

I pulled some must from each bin and blended the sample, then tested for Brix readings with a hydrometer around 9 p.m. Came up at 25 degrees Brix. This is about exactly where I wanted to be: I am not a huge fan of 15+% alcohol-content wines, notwithstanding some pretty good Syrahs here in Santa Barbara County with at least that much alcohol content. I prefer wines that are not so “hot” as to require massive fruit-bomb flavors in order for the taste to register over the alcohol “heat,” so I would like to come in around 14% alcohol, or high 13s.

Quick Ten Minute Viticulture School Lesson: depending on certain more complex factors, your final alcohol percentage will usually wind up around 55% of your Brix reading. In other words, 25 degrees Brix, in this simplified formula, should yield an alcohol percentage in your bottled wine of approximately 13.75% (again depending on some other factors).

Meaning I’m right where I wanted to be.

THE COLD SOAK

Taking my two bins, which I did not feel were as cool as I’d have liked after transport and stomping, I placed a tied-off plastic bag of ice in the middle of each, burying the bag in the must. Ideally I’d have double-bagged to keep the water out upon melting, but the bags were small enough so I wasn’t too worried about the amount of water they’d add (it would just drop my Brix count by a slight notch). Utilizing a strip of plastic (which I sterilized) and a clean washcloth on top of the must (to keep any burning of the grapes/must from happening), I then set a chunk of dry ice atop the must in each bin. The idea being both to help the bin keep cool, but mostly to add CO2 to the top of the bin. At a real winery a shot of CO2 gas would be added to the fermentation bins at this stage, so I was doing the equivalent – again, poor-man’s style, with my Halloween dry ice.

With everything spotless and sterilized, I then placed plastic over the top of the bins, secured the plastic with bungee cords, then placed the lids that came with my trash-bins atop the plastic. Double-sealed. The bins went into the corner of the garage, where I surrounded them with bags of ice and dry ice in buckets, and covered the whole assembly with a blanket. I opened the garage at night when temperatures dropped below 50 degrees, and kept it closed during the warm days.

My poor-man’s refrigerator, all set up for a few days of cold storage! I went back to work at the winery, kept on with the rewrite of my current book, and did my best to ignore my grapes for a couple of days.

Next: Chapter 3: Inoculation and Fermentation!

Let us not forget the mission on which I embarked, in this here GARAGEVINO venture, in the first place: to make extraordinary wine. And while there are viticulture and enology schools, certificate programs, and extension classes galore; along with a plethora of intern, slave (I mean volunteer), and apprentice opportunities available in the industry, there is, of course, no better way to learn than to do.

To paraphrase the way I began this blog, Learn not — do or do not, there is no learning. Well, there’s both. But study without action? Library stuff. And I want to make wine.

So after contacting a few listings and reaching out to the measly few grower contacts I had, I decided, for my first garage vintage, to go with Zinfandel. Reaching him through his posting on winebusiness.com, I made a small deal with a Paso Robles grower named Mike Prowse, deciding to buy one-quarter of a ton of his fruit. Much of Mike’s crop had gone to Cambria, a winery in Santa Maria, if I remember Mike’s story right. But Cambria, or whoever it was, hadn’t taken as much as in the prior year, so he had some rows left unharvested. He decided to open the flood gates to any smaller buyers and I leaped at the opportunity.

The reason I went for it was Mike’s growing program. He keeps his yields low, this year down to somewhere around 1.5 tons per acre. He dropped a significant quantity of fruit in June to get down to that low yield — adding complexity to the grapes that remain on the vine. His vines are head-trained and he uses sustainable growing practices. Very close to organic, with very few if any pesticides or herbicides used, particularly this year. He indicated he’d done a test on the rows we were discussing a few days before and the fruit came in at 26 Brix and 3.6 ph. His price was reasonable at $1500/ton — on the high end for large quantities of Paso Robles Zinfandel but not when you’re buying small quantities as in my case. The fact he prorated it for me was a favor — ¼ ton for $375. There was one catch — but it was a catch I liked: for only a quarter-ton he couldn’t bring in a crew to harvest — he and I would need to do it ourselves.

How great is that — picking the fruit myself, with the farmer who grew the grapes, for my first vintage.

And so early on the morning of Sunday, October 21, I took a set of four freshly sterilized food-grade plastic trash bins (two 44-gallon jobs, two 30-galloners also), obtained at Craig Jaffurs’ recommendation from Smart & Final — plus a set of shears, a baseball cap, gloves, some cold-weather clothes, and headed up the highway in my Sequoia for the two-hour drive north from Santa Barbara.

Here I am cleaning my soon-to-be fermentation vessels, AKA trash bins, the night before I head up to Paso Robles. (Even if it’s midnight when you get around to it, there’s something exciting about sterilizing bins of your own after you’ve spent much of the harvest season cleaning them for the winery you work for. You do, however, begin to feel a bit odd as the clock creeps past midnight — you wonder, as you clean trash bins and set aside squares of plastic tarp and towels in your car, whether your neighbors are thinking they live beside Ted Bundy, or some other maniac bent on creating an opening scene out of Law & Order: SVU.)

Mike’s vineyard is near the tiny town of Creston. He’s got a website if you’d like to find out more. By a little after 8 a.m., I pulled through his gates, we got acquainted, and he went and got his ATV. I noticed as I pulled in, by the way, that it was 40 degrees out. My grapes would be nice and cool from the cold October Paso Robles overnight chill.

As you can see, Creston Hills Vineyard, as he calls his place, has that Paso Robles “hills of Tuscany” look to it — and Mike and his wife have Australian Shepards to help them enjoy the property, duly announced by the sign at the entrance to their driveway. Note the bird-netting over the rows. Over most of the rows, anyway.

Mike set the ATV up with a trailer and loaded a quarter-ton bin on the trailer.

He had me grab a pair of the picking bins, outfitted one of the ATV’s handlebars with a small bucketful of water (used to dip our shears when they got sticky from the grapes), gave me a short tour of his property and pulled into Block 2 for the morning harvest.

Here I am clipping clusters. Zinfandel can be inconsistent, berry-to-berry, cluster-to-cluster, even vine to vine. In some cases, you’ll find green, pink, deep purple and raisined berries all on the same cluster. Some say the raisined berries give you extra tannins on a per-pound basis; some say the vast range you find in the fruit gives Zin its unique character. Either way it was nice to be able to pick out the clusters I preferred.

We tested a few with Mike’s refractometer; some clusters appeared ripe but when held up to the sun were pink rather than purple and tested around 19 or 20 Brix; the purpler, riper clusters were as high as 28 Brix. I caught a grasp of how to pick and choose the right mix to shoot for 25 or 26 Brix in my little bit of tonnage.

We would clip clusters into our picking bins, which when full might have been 30 or 40 pounds. Take the bins, dump them into the quarter-ton big-bin on the ATV trailer, and vine by vine, row by row, the big bin begins to fill up. Had the opportunity to remove any stray leaves and other junk at every stage. Mike was pretty helpful in telling me which clusters I’d picked shouldn’t make the cut.

And no, I didn’t actually drive this thing (for fear of running down a half-dozen of Mike’s vines), but here I am for a photo op aboard the ATV.

As the sun rose, the vineyard heated up, maybe closing in on 75 degrees. Bees and birds began to join us for the festivities. Whether it came as a result of the bird netting being a little loose or semi-removed, the one issue I began to have with the harvest was the large number of berries I encountered that had been munched upon, either by bees, other insects, or birds. I assume birds got it started and insects followed once berries were punctured. It wasn’t a consistent issue, but I did skip the occasional vine and plenty of clusters in an attempt to keep the fruit whole and clean of pest-tasting activity.

The big bin fills up…

And right around noon, I had my quarter-ton. Pretty sad if you think about it, but that’s what you get when two gringos are doing the picking: a quarter ton in 3.5 hours of picking. Machine harvesters, we ain’t.

Mike drove the fruit up to my car so we could transfer to my sterile bins. Ideally we might have just stayed with the quarter-ton bin, but I wouldn’t have had any way to get it out of my Sequoia back at home. So fistful by fistful, Mike and I transferred the fruit to my four smaller bins, all but filling them up. Seems I’d bought the perfect amount of gallonage, bins-wise.

Then Mike asked me a question, and I realized I’d forgotten one whole step entirely.

“How are you destemming?” Mike says.

“You could do whole clusters,” he says.

We discussed the idea of utilizing the destemmer he had tucked away in his garage, but since we hadn’t arranged this in advance, it might take too long to get it out and put it to work. In the end I decided I’d do my best to pull stems from the bins after or during the crush — which I planned to have my kids do the old-fashioned way. So I’d be going old-fashioned the whole way.

Turns out, after talking to a few excellent winemakers, that whole-stem fermentation is a great idea for Zinfandel. The very next day, in fact, while working at Jaffurs, I confirmed this as a common practice (at least for certain varietals) — as a half-ton bin of whole-cluster Syrah was set aside for foot-stomping the following day.

By the time Mike and I finished transferring the Zin to my bins, it was almost 1 p.m. and closing in on 80 degrees out. My idea on this vintage was to cold-soak the fruit before crushing for at least 2-3 days, so I didn’t want the grapes to warm up past 55 or 60 degrees if I could help it. I realized further that in my excitement to get up here and pick the fruit, I neglected to get my hands on some dry ice to keep the bins cool.

So I cranked the AC in the Sequoia the whole way back, called around some stores on the drive south, and discovered some Halloween dry ice was available at Ralph’s near my home. I picked up a few bags of regular ice along with the dry stuff, shoved it in the back with the bins, and pulled into my driveway around 3 p.m. nearly frozen stiff…but with four cool bins of cool fruit in a cool car ready to begin their cold soak in proper fashion!

My three kids and wife came out to have a look at what Crazy Daddy the Garage Winemaker had spent the morning picking. No, it was not, as it might appear, an organ harvest, or heart-transplant medivac trip — but a successful harvest of my first, official, quarter-ton of California winegrapes destined for the inaugural vintage of GARAGEVINO wine.

Next: Chapter 2: The Crush, and Other Notes

Since I hadn’t learned how to upload photos to the garagevino blog until now, I present, for your viewing pleasure, or comedy — or tragedy — a brief photo essay of my first week on the job as Craig Jaffurs’ 2007 harvest intern. You might want to refer back to last week’s entry, where the written account of said first week corresponds loosely to the visuals I’m posting today.

Without further ado:

A JOB WELL RESEARCHED

On my way out the door, I present hard evidence of the thorough research I performed prior to showing up for my first day of work on Montecito Street (in case your browser doesn’t give you a crystal-clear image, that bottle is empty, folks).

GRAPES AND A FORKLIFT

The job I’m about to do is all in preparation for this — the arrival of the grapes. Approximately seven tons of fruit greeted us on my first day, some of it Syrah (Jaffurs’ renowned specialty), some of it Grenache (another notable varietal on the Jaffurs label).

THE INFERNAL MACHINE

The half-ton bins will be dumped into the hopper, which funnels them down into the beast: the crusher-destemmer. Fruit comes out below, and stems, to the right. Except there’s a catch — actually two of them. First…

THE HOSEDOWN

Before a single grape can be dumped into the hopper, everything must be cleaned. This means hosing down the pad, hosing off the bins, sterilizing the bins, hosing them off, sterilizing the tools, hosing them off, and so on. This, of course, is a duty assigned, preferably, to the lowest man on the totem pole, i.e. the harvest intern (moi). And then there’s the second catch…

THAT WHOLE DESTEMMING THING…

…well, it seems not every stem is snagged by the destemmer. So part of what winemakers who really care about their final product require is for their winemaking staff, and (mostly) the harvest grunts like me, to dive for those wayward stems.

STICKY

It can get pretty messy…

THE GRAPE-JUICE SHOWER

…and sometimes you need to get your ass all the way in there to reach the cascading dispersal of wayward stems. All but your ass, anyway. (Get it? That’s the sort of pun my father taught me at the dinner table as a child, so it kind of flows naturally from the keyboard, know what I mean?) And yes, that well-fed waistline and its trunk are mine.

IT’S ALL WORTH IT…

…since these grape clusters, by way of the toiling crew’s labors, wind up…

FERMENTING

…in these bins, after which they are transferred to the barrels and, after appropriate aging, into the bottles with that Jaffurs label plastered on their curved sides.

THE JAFFURS TEAM

Here they are — the Jaffurs Wine Cellars team, from left to right Craig Jaffurs, Matt Brady, and Dave Yates. And despite this photojournalist’s out-of-focus camerawork, it seems that the Jaffurs team was kind enough on that first day to reward…

THE TIRED HARVEST INTERN…

…with a full bottle to replace all that well-researched preparation I did before arriving to work the hoses on the pad!

I can’t thank Craig, Dave, nor Matt enough for the opportunity they were willing to offer an aspiring but fairly un-knowledgable intern-slash-winemaker such as myself. It’s a nice thing for a rookie to find a home beneath the wings of such guys, fine winemakers and people both, as I embark on the path to my own family vino business.

Stay tuned — as promised, the tale of the harvest, crush, inoculation and pressing of my first (non-commercial) GARAGE VINO, a Paso Robles Zinfandel, will be up next.