I'm trying to consciously pay attention to my surroundings. When you are walking around a beautiful vineyard like Coeur de Terre noticing beauty is easy--it's everywhere. At lunch today I hiked up the hill to the top of the vineyard and I noticed this old, gnarled oak tree. Something about it was compelling, like I'd seen it before. I couldn't really place where until I went back down to the cellar to start up bottling again and then it hit me. This is almost exactly the same picture that is on the '10 Willamette Valley Pinot Noir label. I've seen it several thousands times in the last few days! The vineyard is always beautiful, but it is especially so right now. The colors in the nearby hillside are starting to turn, and the grapes are lush and low hanging. The lighting is saturated, causing the colors to glow even more.
The little guy swimming in the pond in the picture to the right makes me think that the bird
The little guy swimming in the pond in the picture to the right makes me think that the bird cannons may not be doing their job. There is one located about 20 feet from where he is swimming and he flinches a lot less than I do when it goes off.
After lunch Scott says he's going to walk around the vineyard and check sugar levels. You do this with a nifty tool called a spectrometer. You grab a grape and squeeze it and set it on a glass tab. Then you look through the lens of the device and it shows you the sugar levels (read in brix.) I ask Scott what level he needs for harvest. He says ideally he'd like to get to 23 or so. Some of grapes in the upper vineyard are reading 18 and 19
After lunch Scott says he's going to walk around the vineyard and check sugar levels. You do this with a nifty tool called a spectrometer. You grab a grape and squeeze it and set it on a glass tab. Then you look through the lens of the device and it shows you the sugar levels (read in brix.) I ask Scott what level he needs for harvest. He says ideally he'd like to get to 23 or so. Some of grapes in the upper vineyard are reading 18 and 19
brix. Just a bit further down the hill they are reading 21 and 22 brix. Scott and Lisa do a quick
consultation. It looks like we'll start picking next Wednesday. Some of the upper vines may not be harvested until November. Scott shows me how to tell if the grapes are ready for harvest. I'm surprised to learn that you want the grapes to be just a bit soft. I would have thought you would want them to be firm like a table grape. He also shows me how you can see the inside of the grape sticking to the seeds more in riper fruit. I'm excited because tomorrow we're going to go out and look at some of the other vineyards from which Scott is purchasing fruit this year. And, the weather looks as though it just might cooperate with partly sunny weather through next week.
There's a new guy on the team today (I'm not the rookie anymore, yea!) So, I managed to get into the bottle filling
station. During a break in the action I filled up the cork reservoir and then took over controls. My goal was to fill and cork a thousands bottles of wine. I would know it was a thousand when the cork hopper was empty. It takes a long time, and just as I was getting there, Scott walked by and noticed that we needed more corks. So he filled the hopper again. By the time I was done the hopper was half way down again, so I estimate I did something like 1,500. I have experienced all of the different jobs now. Today I topped them off by putting together boxes with a hot glue gun. (That's the much less than tidy box building station to the left.) I'm glad we'll be done with this phase tomorrow. At one point when I was filling up bottles Lisa came through, pointed out one that wasn't quite right and then, said, go ahead and take one of these home when they're messed up. The problem is that never happens. I mean, we do mess them up, but there always seems to be a way to fix just about anything. If the level is too low, pull the cork, add some more wine and re-cork it. If it's too high, pop it open and pour a little bit out. If the labels aren't right, soak the bottle in warm water and scrape it off and re-label it. But today we found a problem that couldn't be fixed. Someone dropped a bottle on top of another one and broke the glass. I was going to throw it away, but Ryan said it would perfectly safe to drink. And since he's an officially trained
wine sommelier and everything, and since he agrees to take the first drink, I decide to believe him (plus, I really want to taste this wine.) And it is amazing. I just plain love it. The aroma is so rich with ripe fruit, spice and leathery notes. I've tasted wines that cost twice as much that have less complexity of taste. That you can purchase this Pinot Noir for $20 is incredible. So we end our work day by toasting all of the hard work that went into growing the grapes that made this wine. We toast the hard work of turning those grapes into wine. And, finally, we toast all the hard work of getting it into bottles and off to the store. I now know something about that last one.