
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.