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.