From Vine to Wine

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.