From Vine to Wine

As the press began its inward spiral, we sampled the effluence. It was sweet, and I was instructed to look for notes of melon and honeysuckle. Just like when I’m tasting wine, the nouns and adjectives used to describe the wine by the label or by the expert are never the ones I would’ve come up with by myself, but given the verbal beating over the head, I start to say—ah-hah!—and taste those very flavors. Melon … yes. Honeysuckle … why, of course.

As more grapes and seeds were crushed, the color of the juice became darker and the flavors more developed.

“Can you taste the cinnamon? That’s the tannins,” asked Jeff.

My tongue swirled around my mouth looking for cinnamon. None was to be found, though the mouth feel did begin to change. It was thicker, and made me pucker a bit. Closer together the plates moved, and the color of the juice began to look like unfiltered apple juice. The flavor picked up hints of apple as well, something I could immediately identify.

It was around noon when we finished the Chardonnay and switched to the Pinot Noir. The press was moved to make room for the crusher, a stainless steel contraption that, with a corkscrew like motion, separates stems from seeds, skins, and juice, all of which are pumped into a stainless steel tank.

While I pitch forked stems into the back of the winery truck, I wondered what the three visitors (who spent most of the day drinking wine on the patio) thought of the whole process. For the uninitiated, it can be an assault on the senses. There was the loud grind of the crusher, and the forklift cranking up bins of Pinot into the hopper. There was the strong, sweet smell of crushed fruit, which intensified as the sun rose higher. There was Gary, a local winery worker, driving the beat up truck to the pasture to dump the stems, while the yellow jackets, a constant fixture in Napa during crush time, swarmed around everything that grape juice had touched. Lucky, the winery cat, had climbed into one of the visitors laps, and a few wild turkeys strutted around the driveway.