Hunger games...with wine

It’s been a week since I left Stellenbosch after my time working the vintage at Jordan and I’ve gone back to normal life in London. The stains around my fingernails have slowly been cleaned away and the bruises have faded. All the rooibos tea I consumed has finally dissipated from my bloodstream. Squeezing onto the Tube on rush hour is something I did not miss while I was away, but seeing friends and family certainly was. And sleeping. The night I got back I slept for 11 hours soundly, and was blissfully oblivious to the urban cacophony that usually occurs outside our flat coming from the cars, sirens, loud neighbours and urban foxes.

There were a few topics that I wish I could have blogged about while I was in South Africa if there were a little more time to do so. However, I decided some retrospective posting would still be fine, as there were so many wonderful things about the experience: harvest dinners, trips visiting wineries and cellars, and sightseeing around the Cape.

As my normal waking life is usually spent eating or thinking about what to eat next, I thought a quick post about harvest dinners would be appropriate. Also, since I’ve been eating the same amount now with much less physical activity as I did at harvest, I've been looking back longingly at all the amazing meals we had while I was there and wish I had the turbo-charged metabolism to eat that much again.

Most nights during harvest, we would all take a break from cellar work and sit down for a family-style meal at around 7:30 or 8 in the evening. Food was certainly considered fuel at that time, but our dinners were also a way to put some hedonism into our days and keep us sane. And what meals they were! The cooks, including Kathy, Siska (the bakery chef), and the Jordan restaurant chefs, fed us exceedingly well. Gary would also arrange blind tastings for us and we’d go around the table talking about the wines and how they were made. We had some incredible bottles. Here’s a look at some of my favourite meals:

Gary and Kathy's son Alex has a friend who is a tuna fisherman and sold the restaurant a whole fish one week. We were the lucky recipients of lots of tuna steaks that the restaurant chefs seared with a ginger sauce. The theme of the night's blind tasting was white wines from estates called 'Jordan' around the world - from Austria (from a family estate of a former intern who also had the surname of Jordan), from the Jordans in Sonoma, and from Gary and Kathy's range.

Roast chicken with a caper sauce. The Jordans had a signature salad with feta, olives and tomatoes that served as a lovely side to our mains on most nights. This was paired with a variety of rieslings, which had zesty acidity and crisp lemon and floral notes that stood up to the bold flavours of the chicken.

Paella night! Gary paired this with some seriously good oaked Chardonnays, which had the richness, deepness of flavour (ripe lemon and buttery/toast) to stand up to the heft of the rice dish but had enough bright acidity to cut through it nicely. The highlights were the Louis Latour Premier Cru Chateau de Blagny Meursault and the Jordans' top-end Cape Winemakers Guild 2010 Reserve Chardonnay.

And the whole line-up

Steak with bearnaise sauce and a 1987 Nederburg Cabernet Sauvignon. This dinner was on a Friday after a really hectic week and it was such a treat. The wine had lovely flavours of cedar, tobacco, dried plums and a slight oxidative nuttiness. This went so nicely with the seared beef and the creamy sauce.

Gary was so generous in sharing his wine collection with the team. During the first week he asked us what our birth years are and then towards the end of the harvest, he brought some lovely contemporaries of ours to dinner:

Mike: 1986 Iron Horse Chardonnay (where Gary and Kathy did their first ever vintage) - toasted almond, butter, lemon; a slight sherry note from the oxidative aromas

Mathias: 1987 Overgaauw Tria Corda - a Bordeaux blend that I've lost my notes for, but was indeed amazing

Me: 1982 KWV Cabernet Sauvignon - dried fig, walnut, tobacco and leather aromas

Sjaak: 1976 KWV Cinsault - dried cherry, rounded oak and nutty notes

And of course, we had good ol' spaghetti Bolognese with a beer. Sometimes after being around so much wine and grapes, you really just crave an ice cold brewsky. As Mike said, "It takes a lot of beer to make good wine."

Although we often had to go back in the cellar after dinner to finish up work and clean, our bellies would be full and our thirst would be satiated. We’d crank up music and then move, move, move. It might not have been easier after a big meal to climb up ladders close up tank lids or sweep grape skins off the floor after emptying the press, but it was a lot more pleasurable doing it.

Release date (a fond farewell to Jordan)

 

 

Jordan's vineyards and the estate's main building

Today is my last full day at Jordan and what a day it was. The cellar was extremely busy: we pressed three overhead tanks of red wine, inoculated two newly filled red tanks with yeast, crushed several tons of cabernet sauvignon and riesling, inoculated three tanks of chenin blanc we pressed two days ago, and received and cleaned several new tanks as the tonnage we've been harvesting looks to be the largest on record and we've run out of tank space to put things in. And I was only there part of the day, as Gary, Kathy, and Sjaak let me have part of the day off to do wine tastings at several nearby wineries (more on this in future posts)

 

 The recycling bin outside the Jordan building. Enough said!

 

Although it's 11:30 pm and I'm completely exhausted after having woken up for pumpovers at 5:20 am for the past three weeks, I thought I should post one last time before I leave to summarise a bit. In essence, it's been the most physically and mentally challenging jobs I've ever done in my life. It's a test of endurance, during which you learn so much about how you can push yourself. But you manage to get through it with the support of the team and the camaraderie that long hours, early starts and tiring work fosters.

I've learned so much about wine-making. Having taken theoretical concepts and putting them into reality here are a few things I've found out:

• Pumps and pipes are the lifeblood of a winery and most of the cellar hand's working day is spent putting them together and cleaning them
• Grape skins are extremely slippery when you step on them
• Making wine is like tending to a demanding lover - you have to pay attention to it night and day, treat it gently and stop at nothing to tend to its needs

In addition to being tougher mentally, my body has also changed. It's more badass. I have carved-out biceps. The surface area of my body covered bruises and cuts is greater than that without them. I banged up by elbow, got caustic acid burns on my foot, and have had gushing water, pipes, ladders and bungs hit my face at various times. Kathy also predicted quite rightly that on week 2 everyone gets a cold. Being wet constantly through the day and the lack of sleep started taking a toll on the immune system at exactly that point: me, Laura, and Mattias all got the sniffles right on cue on the first day of our second week of harvest.

 Sjaak's KT strips really worked on my banged up elbow, which was strained after trying to stop a CO2 tank from toppling over. 2 days of wearing them and it was healed.

My bandaged foot after getting burned by salanol, a cleaning agent with caustic acid in it.

 

Also, the  mark of someone who works in a cellar is hands that look like they've been infected with the black plague - once you start working with reds, you have a constant purple/grey stain on your palms and fingers and it seeps into the small cuts and cracks. I kind of like it...makes it feel like I'm part of a piratical-spirited community of wine-makers.

 

The very first two days on the job, every muscle was sore and I couldn't imagine not having a day for them to recover, as I usually do when I work out at the gym. After the first day of pumpovers, my forearms ached like crazy and I didn't think I could screw on a single pipe the next day let alone move my arms up, But, you learn to power through and get over the hurdle and become stronger. And leaner. My belt is on the last, tightest loop and my jeans are loose. I feel like I could run a 10K tomorrow without any problems.

I have to say that it's been an experience of lifetime. There were times when I thought I couldn't get through the day and sincerely believed that all wine-makers are insane to do what they do. And there were times when I loved being in the cellar and could completely see why people are drawn to wine-making as a career. I'll never forget what I learned and how I've changed. I can't thank the Jordans enough for giving me this opportunity and I hope to come back and visit soon...and maybe screw on some pipes and valves in the cellar for old time's sake.

 

A rare calm moment in the cellar, watching the press

 

Barrelling down

There is something poetic about oak barrels. They give wine finesse and complexity, adding extra notes of spice, wood and vanilla to the fruit aromas and flavours. The barrel rooms are also the calmest places in the cellar at Jordan. Away from the din of the pumps, crusher and press (which all are really, really noisy during the day), the cellar room is an oasis.

The oak barrel treatment that wine-makers give to wine is necessarily careful and deliberate. Every year Jordan places orders for barrels from several cooperages in France and the US. They look at the sales of their oaked wines to determine how much to make for the next year, how many new barrels they will need, and how much wine from a tank to put into the barrels. As Sjaak told me, it takes a minimum of 5 years to get the process down in terms of sales projections, orders, and building up a relationship with the cooperages. Also, it takes that amount of time at least to get the recipe right. Not every wine that has oak treatment is made of 100% oaked wine; usually wine that is barrel aged or fermented also has a percentage that hasn't been in a barrel at all  to give it freshness and vibrancy. To make a finished wine, wine-makers blend specific proportions of oaked and unoaked wines in order to get the balance of flavours right.  In order to choose what is put into barrel, wine-makers will taste the must from different lots (vineyard plots) stored in separate tanks to gauge if they are suitable for barrel aging. Usually this means that they can 'handle' the oak - they're full bodied and flavourful enough to stand up to having an oaky influence too.

In addition, barrels from different coopers have different aromas. I've been sniffing the barrels in the cellar each day I'm down there, and there really is a difference between the types. Some coopers' barrels have a buttery/vanilla aroma, while others have a more spicy/earthy note.  Also, there is a consideration of how many brand new oak barrels to use versus old oak barrels, which had wine in it before and lends a subtler and softer oak flavour than new oak. When asked about how to decide what barrels to use for each lot of wine, Sjaak put it this way: "Blending wine from different barrels is like making a curry; you have different spices to hand and you add them according to your taste".

But how do actually treat wine with oak? For whites, Jordan starts fermenting the wine in a stainless steel tank and then transfers it to the barrels via a pump when it reaches a certain Balling (sugar) level, usually when it's been fermenting 3-4 days. We add nutrients to the barrels for the yeast, and the wine finishes fermenting in them.

 

Long, a permanent team member at Jordan, is pumping finished Merlot into barrels for aging

We also check the Balling levels each day by siphoning off some wine from a random selection of barrels from each lot, measuring them, and then putting the wine back into the barrel. That's been my job for the past 4 weeks since when we started putting wines in barrels and it takes about an hour to do each morning from start to finish.

Siphoning wine from a barrel to take a Balling reading

The yeast lees give the wine a lot of flavour and they and the CO2 that's produced protects the wine from oxidization and spoilage. After the fermentation finished, the barrels are topped up with more wine to protect it from oxidising, as the yeast have finished fermenting and producing CO2, and then they'll roll the barrels once a week so the yeast lees are circulated around the wine. The young wine undergoes malolactic fermentation in the barrel too. This second, natural bacterial fermentation automatically occurs and changes the wine's acidity from malic acid (which is like the acid in a tart green apple) to lactic acid (which is the softer acid found in milk-based things like yoghurt). This makes the wine creamier and more smooth in the mouth.

For reds, the process is much the same although the wine is completely fermented when it's transferred to the barrels. It simply ages in them for a specific number of months.

At Jordan, the approximate barrel aging times are:

Chardonnay - 9 months
Chardonnay in their Nine Yards (premium) label - 12 months
Sauvignon Blanc - 8 months
Chenin Blanc - 7 months

Merlot - 16-24 months
Cabernet Sauvignon - 19-24 months
Syrah - 12-16 months

3 months before the aging is due to finish, the wines will tasted to determine how to blend the finished wine. How much is coming from the barrels and those that were just kept in tanks is a crucial decision. Consistency is important year after year for a given type of wine (say, the oaked Chardonnay), but each vintage is different and thus the wine from a lot could be more acidic, alcoholic, etc compared to the previous year. Blending is a skill and an art.

Jordan's white wine barrel room

I really enjoy going down to the barrel rooms to do the fermentation readings as it's a pretty zen time of the day. The only noise you can hear is the CO2 bubbling away from the special bungs that are placed on them which allow the gas to escape without letting any air in, which oxidises the wine. There is a little recess of water which bubbles up as the CO2 escapes from the barrel as part of the fermentation process. The noise of upwards of a hundred barrels bubbling away is actually quite soothing. Although, one time after we added nutrients to a barrel of newly fermenting wine, the yeasts went a bit too happy, and bubbled up causing the bung to pop up out of the barrel and hit me in the face! Occupational hazard.

Don't put your face too close to the bungholes!

 

 

All vats are grey

Winery work is hard. It's also really time-consuming. Reading about wine-making from textbooks or reference guides, it never really occurs to you just how long every step takes. For the human race, in ancient times, to have discovered how wine is made and then for us to have continually refined the back-breaking process for thousands of years is a true testament to the fact that we are civilised beings and care about things that give pleasure to life rather than just living to survive.

In any case, this post is about the realities of wine-making and not just having the opportunity to put a reference to The Cure in the title, although it was too tempting to resist.

My WSET colleague Nick, who went to Plumpton to study vinification and worked several harvests put it best when he said,"Wine-making is all about long periods of monotonous repetition interspersed with periods of hard work and the odd flash of panic!" The sheer quantities of grapes > juice > wine means that there is some serious time to process everything.
For instance, here are the major steps and approximately how long it takes for each one:

Bringing grapes in via a truck and crushing them in a crusher = 2 tons in ~20-30 minutes

Pressing the juice from the crushed skins, pips and pulp = 2 hours to press a load

Settling (allowing the juice to settle so the solids sink to the bottom and then pumping the clear must to another tank) = 2 days

Racking (actually pumping away the clear juice from the solids, aka the 'lees') =  2 hours for 5,000 litres

Proofing the yeast and adding to the tank = 30 minutes to proof but you have to add nutrients and also possibly acid beforehand to the tanks

Fermenting the must until it's completely dry (very little residual sugar left, which is barely perceptible on the palate) = 7-10 days, and you have to check the sugar levels of each tank every day to gauge how fast it's fermenting

If you decide to ferment any white wines with oak, you need to transfer the fermenting-in-process tank into barrels, which involves pumping your tank of wine into a set quantity of barrels. Every day we do an analysis of a random selection of barrels from each lot to measure how fast fermentation is happening.

 

For reds:

After crushing you directly pump them into overhead tanks, and ferment them, rather than pressing first. Then you start pumping them over (see previous post). Each tank is on average pumped over for 30 minutes, 3 times a day. Jordan has 24 tanks, so it takes about 2 hours to do them all, plus set-up and cleaning. Generally, pump overs takes 3-4 people about 8 hours each day, leaving not much time to do anything else!

 

Repeat pump overs until the wine is dry per vat = usually about 5 days from start to finish for each

Press the red wine = 2 hours, and then transfer it to a tank

If you decide to age any red wine in oak, you pump them into a set number of barrels

That's about where we are now in the harvest although there's a lot more other types of work on the horizon. Imagine doing multiple parts of these steps on a given day! Also, cleaning everything takes quite a long time too. All the equipment needs to be very clean, tidy and hygienic. Jolette said the first day we were in the cellar, 'Wine-making is 90% janitorial work!"

It's been absolutely crazy but we've been managing to get it all done somehow.

Yeasts of the southern wild

It’s been a week since I posted last, but harvest has been so hectic that I haven’t had a chance to sit with my computer and write. It’s been 13-16 hour days with a couple 4 am starts, so both my mind and body have been prioritising sleep over blogging. Nevertheless, since then we started fermenting so many tanks of must by adding yeast to them (the actual ‘wine’-making part) I thought I’d write a bit about the topic.

Yeasts are magic. They are the ones responsible fermenting what is essentially just grape juice into an even more delicious alcoholic beverage that people buy to celebrate or unwind with,  to drink when they’re happy, sad or fighting global wars (like Madame Taittinger and Churchill respectively) and generally obsess over.

Reading about wine-making before, I never really gave much thought about yeast. I didn’t realise just how many types of yeasts there are. There are yeasts for all occasions and wine styles, bred by companies to suit any type of need -slow, fast, hot, and cool fermentations, and ones that impart certain flavours to the final wine.

What’s interesting about it is that although it seems quite complex, the process of adding yeast to must to make wine is very similar to that when you prep it for baking bread. It actually looks and smells the same – miniscule sandy-coloured pellets when dry with a bready and beer-like aroma. To proof it for a vat of wine, you add hot water to a bit of grape juice to get it going. Warmed up and active, they start bubbling away quickly and create a nice warm foam floating on top of the juice that you have to stir around with your hand. Laura took quite a fancy to this, and it does feel pretty nice, although your hands smell like yeast for the rest of the day.

For white wines, before fermenting with yeast, you crush the must, press it to remove the juice from the skins and grape solids. Then you settle it so any remaining solids float down on the bottom of the vat and can be removed before adding the yeast so essentially you ferment it as a clear juice. You make up the yeast separately in a bucket and climb a ladder to pour it into the vat from the lid on the top.

A yeast culture for white wine that just started proofing, and then the same yeast 5 mins later

For reds, you actually crush the grapes and leave them in a vat with the berries and skins and then add the yeast to ferment. This helps extract colour and flavour from the skins, so that the juice has all that lovely red wine aroma and tannin that comes from the skins. Adding red wine juice to the yeast to activate it makes it looks a bit like strawberry yoghurt! At Jordan, we add the yeast when the red must is being pumped over, which is basically circulating it by drawing it off the bottom of the vat and pumping it over to the top so it sprays down and mixes again with the must. It’s a messy business, and you get splattered with red wine droplets all over any exposed parts of your body. Red juice beauty spots are a common sight amongst the team.

 

 

 

Red wine yeast-making, pouring juice into the yeast to 'feed it' during proofing, and Mike watching over a pump over process for Merlot

 

Apologies for the fuzzy pictures. Took them on my old iPhone in the cellar as having a camera around is a bit risky with all the juice droplets flying around!

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