The Crush

On Thursday, Oct-20, I drove from San Jose to Napa to pick up my grapes. I drove early to avoid traffic and grabbed coffee at Bouchon Bakery in Yountville. If you've been to Napa more than once, then you know about the Bouchon Bakery. Amazing breads and pastries for which you briefly imagine that you don't care about calories. You sit outside under a tree enjoying the air, great pastries, and watch an idiot tourist feed their muffin to the birds.

Thus began the longest day of the winemaking process, and the most traumatic day of the grapes' lives.

Anyway, when I drove through the town of Napa, it was so foggy, I had to use my windshield wipers intermittently. It was cold and the grapes in the valley were still struggling to ripen when, in a typical year, they would have been picked weeks before and happily fermenting in a cement or steel tank somewhere.

Not my grapes. My grapes were up on Mt. Veeder, overlooking the foggy Napa Valley. I drove out of the foggy valley, up to a beautiful hillside vineyard called Godspeed. The farmer was nearly done stacking my grape containers. As you can see, the vineyard was well above the fog-line, allowing the grapes to ripen earlier than their Southerly cousins, however still four weeks later than a typical year in Napa. These grapes had no sign of mold, but grapes in the valley are beginning to suffer badly from Botrytis. On the contrary, the grapes I loaded into my 4Runner were amazingly congruent, sweet, ripe and clean (save for the ants, spiders and earwigs crawling around).

As it turns out, I calculated correctly - 600 pounds of grapes just fits in containers packed into my 4Runner, including one container in the passenger seat. I turned the air conditioning on high for the two-hour drive home to keep the grapes cool and prevent wild bacteria from prematurly grazing on my grapes. So ten minutes into the drive, shivering, I pulled over to put on my jacket as it was too cold for two hours at that temperature! At one point, a spider rappelled from the ceiling right next to me, but I hastily brushed him out the window without crashing my refrigerated insect zoo.




I got the grapes home and unpacked into my garage, ready to crush and soon realized I had made one mistake - I didn't recruit any help to finish this labor-intensive task. That's also why I have no pictures of the day, the most important day of winemaking - I had no time nor energy to get pictures of the crushing! Sad but true. Nevertheless, the crush went pretty well. I sanitized my four fermentation containers; crushed grapes one bucket at a time with the motorized crusher; and poured crushed grapes and juice into fermentation containers until I could lift no more.

I then added sulfur dioxide (via potassium metabisulfite) to prevent undesirable bacteria from making a home of my juice. After tesing the Brix, pH and acidity, I was happy to know that my grapes were of great quality and needed no adjustment (the joy of living within two hours of Napa Valley). Later, I rehydrated some yeast (BDX and Pasteur Red), along with a yeast nutrient (Go-Ferm), and mixed it in to kick off fermentation.

It's now already two days later (bad blogger). I've been "punching down the cap" twice a day and monitoring the sugars and temperature. As of tonight, I can open a fermenter and actually hear carbon dioxide bubbling up through the cap (skins and other solids). It's a wonderful sound. I had a big smile when I heard it tonight. Even better, my garage smells like heaven. I thought I liked the smell of brewing beer! The smell of fermenting wine is... mouthwatering... ambrosial?

Alright, more next time on "punching down the cap" and managing fermentation. Thanks for reading, friends!

~Dave Sienknecht