Constantia Fresh

Me, Laura and Jolette brushing up nicely outside the cellar at Constantia Fresh. The lovely Louise, part of the full-time Jordan team, was pouring wine for their table at the event

It's unusual to get any time off during harvest on the weekend, but yesterday we finished up a little before 3 pm, which is generally considered an early and agreeable time to finish work. However, then I remembered that we started working at 7 am, so we did end up being in the cellar for almost a full regular working day. And it was a Sunday.

In any case, free time is precious and we did have most of the day on Saturday off. Laura, her fiancé Tom and I drove into Cape Town to wander around and take in the city and also drove to Constantia, home of the oldest vineyards in South Africa, which trace their roots (har har har) back to the original Dutch colony founders’ estates. We had to pay our respects to Klein Constantia and Groot Constantia, two wineries that produced some of the most revered wines on the planet: Vin de Constance, an ethereal, nectar-like sweet wine made from muscat grapes that was drunk by kings, queens and characters in ‘Sense and Sensibility’.

Laura and me in front of Klein Constantia; if wineries can make you star-struck, this is how we felt. Their cellar is immaculate too!

Laura, Tom and me at the lovely and well groomed Groot Constantia grounds; their colonial-style tasting room

Constantia also hosts ‘Constantia Fresh’, an outdoor food and wine festival that is the civilised side of the wine industry compared to lugging pipes and buckets around and getting grape gunk on your fingernails. The wine-makers there are smiling, sun-kissed and unstressed, which is in stark contrast to how they spend the rest of the week in the cellar. Gary and Kathy kindly gave us some tickets, so we had a grand day out.

We scarfed down the amazing food, provided by several winery restaurant chefs, and tasted many of the excellent wines from the 44 wineries that were exhibiting.We recharged our batteries, replenished our fat stores with pork belly sandwiches, and steeled our livers with wine for the upcoming busy week.  Wine highlights included: the Just Riesling range (with rieslings from Jordan, Paul Cluver, Hartenberg, Thelema, Klein Constantia and De Wetshof); and the wines from Reyenke, and Constantia Glen. This is seriously why people come to the Cape winelands and never want to leave.

Pork belly sandwich, seared tuna taco with chili sauce, and fresh chicken and noodle salad 

Just Riesling' wines chilling in a bucket; Klein Constantia's range at the festival

Measure for measure



Log books we keep for science

I’d like to think that my personality traits of being precise, careful, and consistent were what made Sjaak and Jolette pick me as the designated lab analysis person on the team, but it’s more likely to be the fact that I’m a massive nerd. Geek tendencies unleashed, I realised that I do enjoy the lab work a lot, and will be further encouraged as I write this post about science.

People tend to think that winemakers go out amongst their sunny vines, pick a few ripe, glistening grapes and pop them in their mouths and think, ‘ah, now is the right time to pick’. It is true that tasting grapes is a way to gauge the right time to harvest them, as this gives you get a sense of the qualities of the fruit, but a crucial consideration for wine-makers is predictability and consistency. There is a discipline around trying to avoid a disappointing or faulty finished wine. This is when science and relentless measuring come in.

Lab work generally falls under three categories of testing: measuring the sugar levels, pH and acidity.  These things must all be at the right levels and balanced between them to make the resulting wine also balanced, and thus pleasant to drink.  Wine-makers will run tests on the grapes before they harvest them, on the grape must after crushing and pressing, and before, after and during fermentation and bottling.  Basically, wine-makers have to be as obsessed with measurements as the contestants on ‘The Biggest Loser’.

Sugar levels determine a wine’s eventual alcohol level, its mouthfeel, and also how balanced the wine is with its acidity. At Jordan, we measure sugar levels using a ‘Balling’ (aka ‘Brix’)  meter, which gauges the density of a liquid. Sugary liquid like crushed grape must is denser than water, so by putting a Balling meter into it and seeing how much it floats will indicate how much sugar there is in it. The sugar levels will drop after you add yeast to start fermentation, as yeasts will feed on the sugar in the must to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. Like humans, they’re carb-loving and greedy, and will eat all the sugars in the must until there is none left and they kill themselves, so it’s crucial to see where they are in the process so that you can stop fermentation or let it go on until the must (which is now considered ‘wine’ as it’s alcoholic) is completely dry and has no sugar left. These Balling meters are super-delicate, and after a spate of a few broken ones, Jolette started a campaign to 'Save the Balling Meter' and seriously considered making picket signs.

Balling meter in action

We measure acidity by doing a titration, which flashbacks to high school chemistry class. You see how much acid there is in grape must or a wine by adding a basic solution slowly to it until it becomes neutral (equally acidic and basic). We add an 'indicator' solution to the sample, which is basically like a dye that turns pink when the liquid is neutral. Then you measure how much basic solution you used to do this, as that will exactly equal how much acid is in the grape must or wine.

The sample on the right has been titrated to neutral...hence the pinky colour

We measure pH using a handy device – a pH meter, which is beautifully simple to use. You stick the probe into the liquid and press a button and it’ll read the pH. Although pH is an indication of acidity, it also takes into account the effect that natural salts, potassium found in grape skins which affects the acidity, and also its colour, taste and keeping levels (David Bird, ‘Understanding Wine Technology’, 2000). It’s in essence a more accurate indicator of how a wine will behave and how we will perceive it to taste.

 I start each day taking sugar level readings of all the tanks with fermenting must with the Balling meter (19 tanks today). Also if the vineyard team wants to test the ripeness of the grapes on the vines to decide when to pick, they’ll also give us bags of grapes which we will have to crush by hand to get the juice for the acid, pH and sugar readings before Gary, Kathy, Sjaak and Jolette taste the juice. The lab is an oasis of calm amongst the loud clanking of pipes and the screeches of the presses, and is a nice way to start the day. However, it can get a little crazy, like when we had fourteen grape samples to do and I was running around like a mad person on speed!

Squishing grapes from the vineyard to test them in the lab. A sentry of samples in jugs ready to be tested

First crush...the harvest begins

First truck arrives with a load of Sauvignon Blanc grapes

The grapes are dumped into the crusher

 

It is officially the start of the harvest, when the very first grapes from this year's crop are picked and transported from the vineyard into the cellar to be made into wine. Like expectant parents, this is the time when the viticulturalist (grape grower) and vinter (wine-maker) see if all their preparation over the last nine months have produced offspring that are beautiful, amenable, and ultimately an expression of their best combined talents. It's also when sleep is at an absolute minimum. The days start early and the nights are long. The reason is firstly because you need to work quickly. For the grapes to stay fresh and to prevent them from being oxidized, they are harvested  before the crack of dawn so they stay cool. Work in the cellar begins shortly afterwards  as the grapes need to be crushed, pressed, and put into tanks quickly that day. Although the first day might be less hectic, and indeed we finished up at 7 pm today, once many more loads of grapes start to come in, managing the workflow and space in the cellar becomes important and the process is time-critical. Working to 11 pm is not uncommon.

This, of course, puts the fear of God into the winemaking interns or "cellar rats" as the wine industry likes to call them, for their weediness and scurrying abilities. For first-timers like me, the night before is an anxious one. During particularly stressful times, my usual work dreams involve typing on Excel while floating in the air. Last night, I dreamt I was running under massive tanks and pipes.

Luckily for me, when the day arrived everyone was extremely helpful and patient while showing me and Laura the ropes. The course of the day the Jordan team went generally like this.

We started the day with a quick coffee and a power breakfast, a double carb line-up of oatmeal and toast for me. Then we helped with cleaning and preparing the pipes and tanks we planned to use

The first truckload of Sauvignon Blanc arrived a little after 7 am and then several more throughout the day came through to the cellar, totalling 14.6 tonnes worth (=14,600 kg). Each load was treated with an enzyme solution to assist in breaking down the skins. We then put them through the crusher and after it removed the stems and lightly crushed the grapes to release the juice, a team of two picked through them to remove extraneous matter like twigs, large leaves, etc. Afterwards, the must (the crushed grapes and their juice) was pumped to the pneumatic press for 6 hours to macerate and develop its flavours, like stewing loose tea leaves in a mug of water.

Crushing removes the stems and the must is picked through and pumped to the press in cooled pipes

 Egg and cheese sandwiches, in five variations, were gobbled down by the team at lunch.

Once Sjaak and Jolette were satisfied with the way the juice tasted, they begun pressing. The pneumatic press Jordan uses works like a deflated balloon in a tube. The must is pumped inside the tube and to extract more juice the balloon is inflated so that it gently squishes the crushed grapes onto the inside of the tube. The tube has a cylindrical grate running along it to catch the skins, pips, and solid matter, while the juice runs out through valves into a holding tank. The winemaker can inflate the balloon larger in stages, making it bigger each cycle and thereby squishing out even more juice from the skins each time. The best juice comes from the first, lighter presses. This fine, 'free run' juice is pumped to a tank first, to be separated from the more aggressively pressed 'press juice' juice which is coarser and less complex in flavour. Sjaak let us taste the two side by side and the difference is very noticeable. The free run juice is bright green, zippy, and full of flavours of the grape - gooseberry and lime - with a good balance of acidity and sweetness. The press juice is browner as it was more oxidized, and since in this later pressing, the enzymes in the skin had more time to lessen the acidity (by raising the pH), the wine tasted mostly sweet and flat, without the acidity to balance out the sugars.

The beast - Jordan's 15 tonne pneumatic press, which probably can be used to fly to space

I was in charge of pumping the juice from the press's tank into a holding tank, a process that took about 2 hours from start to finish for 10 tonnes of grapes and involves coordinating with Laura to rotate the press so that the juice can fall out through several valves around it into a tank. The quantity of it all is staggering. Juice gushes out of the press like the Niagara Falls and its gobsmaking to see the sheer quantity of grape skins, stems, and seeds that come out of the whole process which filled a truck that removed this waste to be composted at the end of the day. In the end, we had about 12,000 liters of grape juice in the end to ferment into wine. 

My most interesting discovery about wine-making is how much time it all takes. The whole process of just crushing and pressing takes the whole 12 hour day. Jordan also does a 6 hour skin contact time for their Sauvignon Blanc, letting the juice macerate in the crushed grapes to enhance the flavour. In between this waiting, there were other jobs to do. Already-fermented Syrah from last year's harvest had to be blended. Wines made from different parcels of the vineyard are kept separately until blending, as each are tested and tasted for their qualities. When the winemaker blends these together, they make a decision on how much of each go into the finished wine. In cellar terms, this means we had to transfer wine from several separate tanks together into a bigger 'blending' tank to hold it. We worked in a team to do this. Jolette and Laura were at the top of the blending tank to monitor the level of fullness, where I was at the bottom managing closing the valve from the pump after the tank was filled up. General beauty upkeep while making wine is an anathema, as  any sort of makeup and hair rituals in the morning go out the window, but I did enjoy an "Are You Being Served" purple hair rinse that day as we slightly misjudged the tank's fill level and the young, pungent red wine showered down on my head as I closed the valves. A fitting baptism, I think, to the harvest.

A family affair

One of the best things about this experience here is my new 'cellar family'. As Laura pointed out, they are what will pull us together to get through a challenging harvest, where 14 hour days/six days a week is considered normal, if not an easy spell of time, and running around carrying heavy pipes and going up and down ladders with heavy buckets full of yeast on little sleep is normal.

Gary and Kathy Jordan have been incredible hosts and the glue holding us all together. They are quite simply incredible people - so generous with their time and really go the extra mile to make this experience amazing for us. They've invited us to their house several times for dinner, have taken us out to Cape Town for days out and wine tastings, to Stellenbosch for winery visits, and have been more than happy to explain all the in's and out's to winemaking to us novices along the way. They and their kids - Alex and Christy - have welcomed us into their lives and homes most welcomingly and it's been such a benefit to us to feel like a real part of the estate family.

Gary and Kathy Jordan, photo source: www.jordanwines.com

Curious and curiouser

It's surreal that I'm in South Africa, as if I fell down a rabbit hole. The world that was comforting and familiar, suddenly turned from top to bottom. But what feels new and deeply different has always been as it is; it's me that needs to navigate and adapt to this Wonderland.

It was only in September, back in London, when I was sitting in Brockwell Park with my laptop, writing my cover letter to apply for Jordan Wine Estate's "Women in Wine" programme, in which two women working in the wine industry are sponsored by Gary and Kathy Jordan (the husband and wife owners and winemakers) to spend a vintage with them in Stellenbosch. I remember the chill in the air as the wind filtered through the oak trees and felt that me getting accepted into the programme and spending a blazing summer in the Cape were only remote possibilities. And yet, it did feel like something in the air was stirring.

And now, having been accepted on the programme I've just travelled due south to the other side of the world. It is true what people say that the land here in Africa feels more primordial. The sun shines more brightly, and the jagged mountains cut the horizon in deep ripped lines. The granite soils here are more ancient than any other place on earth.

Another side of this newness is more personal, being a part of a winemaking team and seeing for myself how the process works. Through my jobs at Liberty Wines and the WSET, I've seen how finished wine is distributed, sold, analysed and taught about around the world. I've visited wineries on tasting tours and have seen cellars in the US, Spain, Italy and the UK, but to actually be a part of it is something special. I knew that seeing the people behind the wine and the difficult decisions and hard work they put into it would make wine something less abstract. We often talk about wine as if it were a painting - the  impression that it leaves you and maybe a little bit about the artistic techniques used to achieve that. But to actually see the process, the anguish and happiness felt while it was being created, makes you understand it in a visceral way.

But for now, my immediate priority is to not screw anything up.

Luckily, I'm on the programme with a fellow woman in wine, Laura Atkinson, who works with Berry Bros and Rudd in the UK, who has already become a vital a support system, comrade and friend. Lungiswa Sithole, from South Africa, will also be joining us for certain days in the harvest when she can take some time off her hospitality job.

From left to right: me, Laura, Lungiswa, and Kathy Jordan