Cab is King

Good thing I picked up some Burg while in LA, as I've needed it to get through our 12+ hour days at the winery this week.  We're finally harvesting our Cabernet Sauvignon, and I'm told we will continue to pick through Halloween.  Also, I had invited Don Ross of Shibumi Knoll out to dinner on the Sunday I returned, intending to thank him for his generosity and kindness by sharing a bottle of Burgundy with him.  As I saw Don approach me at the bar at Tra Vigne on Sunday, I noticed to my chagrin that he had brought a bottle of wine with him.  He plunked it down on the bar next to me, and though I couldn't see the label, I could still make out the "Rousseau" on the capsule.  Laughing, I asked Don to reveal his wine at the same time I pulled mine out of my wine bag.  I guess great winos think alike! We both brought a Rousseau Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru Clos St. Jacques.  What are the chances?  Of course, Don outvintaged me.  We popped the cork on his 1990, leaving my '02 for my next free moment, which I think will be in 2012.

Great winos think alike!  Don outvintages me in Rousseau.

All is well at the winery, despite my living in fear that any moment I may get yelled at for doing something wrong.  Just tonight, as we were hosing down the crushpad, Aussie intern N sprayed loose two clusters of grapes which had been hidden beneath the scale used to weigh the tonnage of each vineyard block we pick.  Holding the errant clusters, I looked in vain to find the trash can we use for grape detritus.  Asking our oenologist where to throw the stray clusters, I thought I overheard him say, "just huck them into the bushes."  Which is exactly what I did.  Whoops.  He had said, "huck them into the pomace bin" (a giant dumpster in back of the winery used specifically for this purpose), but I misheard him.  Unfortunately, I was in plain view of our winemaker, who gave a shout to raise the dead as I stared at him like a deer in headlights, my throwing arm still raised.  I didn't even have the courage to apologize, but instead scurried off like a hermit crab into the darkness, looking for a place to hide.  Thank God again for P, my fellow newbie intern to whom I owe my stress-reducing mantra, "Bleeeeeeeeeeh."  Still feeling like a moron twenty minutes later, I told P my mistake and how stupid I felt.  "Well," P said philosophically, "the good thing is that you're probably the only one thinking of it now.  In fact, I'm sure they've already forgotten about it."  P, are you the Dalai Lama reincarnate?  P, unbeknownst to him, is now my guru.

I'm not sure there is any such thing as a typical day at the winery, but this week, all our days have started with cleaning the crushpad to prepare for Cabernet Sauvignon and have ended with cleaning the crushpad to prepare for tomorrow's pick.  We've also started pumping over the juice morning and night (circulating the juice from the bottom of the tank to the top in order to keep the "cap" of skins from which we are extracting color and tannin wet), which for me is a scary process, as it involves pumps, hoses, clamps, giant sprinklers, and a myriad of ways to screw up.  This is why for now I've tended to stay outside on the crushpad.  All that aside, another consistency lately has been the hours of endless tuba music our vineyard crew plays while sorting fruit.

On the sorting table

Looking over the fruit

"Mohawks" of mold developing on Cabernet Sauvignon on our Estate and throughout the Valley

I had no idea that Mexicans were related to Germans, but if you heard the same tuba and accordion Oom-Pa-Pa music I've been hearing nonstop, you will start to wonder if Michoacán and Munich aren't closer together on the map.  So far, none of our vineyard workers has shown up wearing lederhosen, but maybe they'll bust that out next week.  The only respite from the Mexican-Bavarian polka is when the youngest of the vineyard crew pops his iPod in the boombox and the occasional rap song is played.  Unfortunately, the last song I heard, blasted at Oom-Pa-Pa levels, was Mickey Avalon's "My D*ck," which includes such culturally thought-provoking lyrics as, "My d*ck -- size of a pumpkin; your d*ck look like Macaulay Culkin."  Thank God there wasn't a tour group walking by.  Needless to say, I think that was a one-time phenomenon and that it is going to be all Oom-PaPa music, all the time, from here on out.

Another thing it seems I can depend on these days is food, and lots of it.  Whenever the vineyard crew picks, a wonderful woman named Marta serves us breakfast and lunch and oftentimes dinner, if the crew is still sorting fruit into the evening.  I thought that being on my feet all day and lifting heavy objects would mean I would lose weight as a harvest intern.  When I stepped on my scale at home this past weekend in LA, I nearly fainted.  How did I gain 5 lbs working at a winery??  I'll show you how.  Check out these photos of Marta's breakfasts and lunches.  In addition, the winery has decided to support a charity bakesale and has provided us with desserts every day.  The following photos are from 24 hours at the winery.  Food is everywhere!  And I even left out photos of dinner.

P grabs a breakfast of champions

M grabs day #2's breakfast: tamales!

The lovely Marta feeds her crew...and adds to my waistline!

Marta serves us coma-inducing burgers 

Just a few of the treats I encountered
in 24 hours at the winery

On a less appetizing note, as we were cleaning our crushpad yesterday, our assistant winemaker asked me to siphon out the ginormous basin of sanitizer we use to rinse out picking lugs and sorting equipment.  Um, is this some kind of intern hazing ritual?  Usually, this tub gets dumped by a forklift.  I seem to be the only intern unable to drive a forklift (P, although a newbie like me, learned forklift skills at a previous job at a windshield factory).  Remember the hotel pool from Chevy Chase's film "Vacation" with the geese swimming in it?   Now you know how I felt when I saw this bin.  Only I wasn't asked to swim in it -- I was supposed to siphon it out with two hoses, my mouth, and a formerly clean set of lungs.  Here's what the water looked like before I began siphoning.

I'm expecting the ducks to come back at any moment

And here's what the water looked like once I successfully got two siphons going (after about 17 separate tries per hose).  Notice that the vineyard crew kept sticking more dirty equipment into the bin.  It's amazing I still want to drink wine after all this.

Intern hazing ritual?

So, does siphoning all these chemicals may mean I now have the world's cleanest lungs or that I am the world's stupidest intern?  Don't answer that.  On a positive note, my clothes, though wine-stained, have a greater chance of getting clean at the winery than they do at my St. Helena rental.  My landlady's washing machine is magical: it turns my white clothes brown, yet my stained clothes remain stained.  Yesterday, while emerging from a tank after cleaning it with hot water, I noticed that my pants were lathered and soapy.  Turns out the machine washing I gave them the night before did a great job of getting the detergent in, but not such a great job of washing or rinsing the detergent out.  I think the machine was considered old during the first moon landing.  So now, whether I am cleaning out a tank, or hosing down the crushpad, or steaming barrels, I have a higher chance of cleaning my clothes while working than I do when actually washing them in a machine.  As my guru P has shown me, I always have to look for the silver lining.

Looking for the silver lining: sunrise at the winery