Much has been said about the disconnect between people and their food, but relatively little has been said about the disconnect between people and their wine. I hadn’t really given much thought to the matter myself—it’s much easier to drink than to think—until recently. I told a friend I was heading to Napa to help crush grapes. She asked, “With your feet?”
I knew the image she had in her head, because a similar one popped into mine. Two women, holding up white, canvas dresses, smiling as they danced barefoot over clusters of fruit. I tried to imagine how long it would take us to crush a ton of grapes by foot. Hours? Days? Weeks? Maybe women in the old country had this kind of time, but I had to be back at work on Monday.
Despite some consumers’ quaint notions, the crushing process has greatly evolved in winemakingland. Large wineries, like most industrial processing facilities, have high-tech computerized systems for crushing grapes. Showing up for work barefoot might get you fired. Even at my family’s small winery Tulocay—where we have none of the computers and plenty of antique equipment—time has moved on. We have the wheel. We have fire and electricity. We have a machine called a crusher.
For as basic as the winemaking process is—mix yeast with grape juice and ferment—things have gotten a little more complex. There are genetically modified strains of yeast. There are $1,000 French Oak barrels. There are stainless steel crushers and bladder presses. It’s not that you necessarily need all the fancy equipment—fermentation knows not foot from machine—but modernism make things go a lot faster.
More important than the equipment, however, is the grapes. My dad buys his fruit from a small vineyard down the road, and when I arrived at the winery for crush, on a cool, clear morning in late September, the grapes had already been delivered. Fernando, the vineyard manager, informed me that they start picking well before dawn, headlamps lighting their way through rows of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
Before we could break grape, I sifted through the large, white grape bins removing MOG, or Material Other Than Grape. Because machines do most of the grape harvesting, many extra items—twigs, vines, leaves, bugs—can end up in the hopper.
I took this sifting opportunity to sample some of the fruit. As a kid, wine grapes consistently disappointed me: they were much smaller than the ones from a grocery store, and their seed seemed to take up over half the flesh. When I’d inadvertently crush the seed between my teeth, a slew of bitter tasting tannins would be released in my mouth, ensuring I wouldn’t go reaching for another sample. But tasting them now is a different experience. The flavor is sweet and complex, and much less tart than traditional grapes. Packed in tight clusters, each grape tastes a little different from its neighbor and each bunch, depending on how much sun exposure or leaf cover it had, tastes different from the next.
We had two varietals to crush that day, Chardonnay, a white grape, and Pinot Noir, a red. The flesh of both white and red grapes is white; it is the red skin that gives red wine its color. Because of this, white wine is pressed only, which squeezes the juice from the fruit, but leaves the skins, stems, and most of the seeds behind. Red wine, on the other hand, is crushed first, which keeps the color imparting skins in contact with the juice, and pressed later.
First up was the Chardonnay. My dad operated the forklift, while Jeff, the winemaker, pitched grapes into the wooden cylindrical press. After all the grapes were in, the press was closed up and turned on. The plates at the end of the cylinder moved together, gently crushing the grapes in the middle. This causes the juice to flow out slats in the bottom, and into a vat below, where it is collected and pumped into a large stainless steel tank.
