I love to be in a vineyard, but I had no idea there would be so much chemistry involved in wine making. I'm a bit nervous about going back out and starting crush at Coeur de Terre. Scott Neal, the Co-owner and winemaker at CdT is a natural science geek. He loves to get into his laboratory and get out test tubes and beakers and perform archaic tests. Me, not so much. I practically flunked chemistry in high school. Part of that was due to the fact that I was a terrible student, but a big part was the periodic table. I have a good friend who thinks it is a work of art and admires how everything fits together. To me it remains a big mystery.
I was in the lab with Scott the other day and he was showing me how to figure out the total acidity of some grapes that we had selected from different vineyards. Did you know that total acidity and PH are two different things? Come on. Doesn't a PH reading tell you the level of acidity in something? No, it turns out, it does not. So we start by making a base solution, then we add 100 ml of some of the smashed up juice from the grapes. This is my first grape crush! The fact that we did it in a one gallon zip lock bag kind of took some of the romance out of it. After Scott added the juice he measures how much base solution it takes to bring the total back up to the level that we started out with. Then Scott looks at his magic book and it shows him what the total acidity is. The levels are high (or at least they were last week, it might be a bit better now.) 
The tool I think is cool is the spectrometer. Here's how it works. Grab a grape, lift the little plastic lid at the end of the device, smash the grape on the glass surface, close the plastic lid, hold the eye piece up to your eye, and look towards a light. A blue bubble appears and shows you the brix level of the grapes. Brix is the level of sugars in the grapes. Last week the level was still a bit low, but any sunshine helps bring the level up. When we get to the lab Scott also does a quick test of the brix so he gets a larger picture of how they are doing in the vineyard as a whole.
We will be starting crush this week. I think Scott has scheduled the picking crew to come in on Wednesday. What will we do in the mean time? In a word, clean. Everything is cleaned. The bins that the grapes will be gathered in when they are picked are cleaned. The sorting table that they will be emptied onto will be cleaned. The de-stemming machine will be cleaned. The wine press will be cleaned. The containers that the crushed wine will go into will be cleaned. The bins that the de-stemmed red grapes will rest in for a week will be cleaned. The large stainless steel tanks will be cleaned. The hoses that we use to transfer the wine from one place to another are cleaned when we are done using them, and again when we haul them out to use again. You do not want the wrong bacteria to grow in the fermenting wine. It does bad things to the taste and aroma, so we clean, and then we clean some more.
I may or may not be able to write much later in the week. I'm assuming we'll be working quite late once crush starts, but I don't know anything for sure.
Oh, and there is another thing the crew can do when they have a spare moment. The can grab a shotgun and shoot it towards the birds. Scott considered netting his whole vineyard as the owner of the vineyard to the left has done. But he thought that the extensive losses they had last year were not going to happen again this year. Last year the birds arrived at a slightly different time, and the food they needed was in short supply and they stripped the vineyards of tons of fruit a day. This year has not been quite as bad. Sitting out in the valley it sounds like a war zone with propane cannons and real shotguns going off on a regular basis. Have you ever thought it would be fun to live next to a vineyard? Not so much during the harvest. Everywhere we traveled we could hear the explosions.
Well, I'm looking forward to crush, but not so much the chemistry.