It was a cute idea I had that I could journal and blog while working harvest for the past two weeks in Willamette Valley, Oregon. Instead, I immersed myself in the work, relishing both the constant company of the R Stu Crew and the solitude my mind needed to get through the last pushes of getting Book + Bottle open, leaving no room for nighttime musings on my computer. Alas, as soon as the physical work ended, my mind took up the slack and got some of my experiences down on “paper” so I could share them with you.

Working a wine harvest has been on my bucket list for years. What better way to learn the industry, challenge my knowledge of the winemaking process, and immerse myself in the culture of wine that I love so much? It seemed like a pipe dream - who can take weeks off, unpaid, from work for a hobby? Well, as the store goes through the abominably slow process of trying to secure a building permit, I found myself with excess energy and time. Alas, some great friends stepped up, recommending me to wineries who needed some extra hands for harvest, and a perfect situation unfolded before me.

For the past two weeks or so, I’ve been out in McMinnville, Oregon, working for the incredible R. Stuart & Co. Winery. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be sharing some musings about what it was like to work in the cellar, what I learned about making wine, and what I loved about the people I got to make wine with. Other than Rob and Maria, the winery owners, I haven’t mentioned any names to protect privacy. I hope you enjoy these stories.

On the pleasure of sharing a meal (and a bottle)

I joke that food is my love language. But, food is my love language. When I arrived in Portland for a two-week long harvest internship, two girls from the winery, whom I had never met, offered to pick me up from the airport after doing some shopping in town. Like I was in the car with old friends, we spend the hour plus drive sharing favorite books and talking food. Favorite restaurants, what was on the menu at the winery for the week, why food is so important, and what we’d give up to be able to eat like that all the time. They joked that this was the only harvest gig in town where you’d gain weight after the week was up. As we drove down 3rd Street, the main drag in McMinnville, they pointed out the restaurants as “the best breakfast,” “best spot for beer,” “omg their pizza is so good.” I knew immediately I was in good company and had just made two new friends for life.

Arriving at the winemaker’s home, I was shuffled in, given hugs, and pushed toward the kitchen island, glass of bubbles in hand. From that second on, I wasn’t the new girl anymore, I was just part of the family. The dog had her head on my knee, the family friend had her arm on my back, and someone was constantly offering to fill my glass with another local wine. Rob, the winemaker was slicing Serrano ham off the bone, the whole haunch bolted in place on a special stand, while the guests picked cheese, home-smoked salmon, creme fraîche, and that delicious ham straight off the serving plates. Maria, the hostess, never didn’t have a smile on her face, and delighted in letting me peruse her cookbooks like Belle in a library.

(I was too busy eating and talking to take a real picture. This is from a different day, showing the love the Stuarts have created. Photo courtesy of R. Stuart & Co.)

The dinner of moussaka and roasted beets was served buffet style so everyone would feel comfortable getting their fill. Twice as much as was needed was prepared so there’d be leftovers, and the plum tart was as delicious as the main course. The table sat eight, and at least as many bottles graced the table. Two were the neighbor’s wine, three were R. Stuart bottles, and the rest were just wines the family wanted to drink. There were side conversations and group discussions, and the table was abuzz with energy, mirth, and camaraderie. It was like Thanksgiving dinner but with people who want to be around each other, and no grievances were aired. Politics came up briefly and one of the women joked, “Don’t like it? Drink up, and stay quiet.”

No one fussed over me. They let me be me. I was offered food, but not judged in how I ate. My belly was full, my heart was warm, and I was told I’d be picked up at 9 A.M. the next morning to start the grueling work of making wine. But, there’d be leftovers for lunch.

Tasting Grapes - From the Vines to the Bottle

The experience of a harvest intern has the potential to be as varied as the wines they help make. I heard stories of twelve interns standing around a single vat watching a lone intern punch down a cap of grape skins because there was nothing else to do and other stories of interns being worked to the bone, losing 10+ pounds in a couple of weeks. My personal experience ran the gamut: one minute hopping as quickly as possible over hoses and around pumps to get a sip of water in the quick break from shoveling grapes through a de-stemmer, a task needing constant attention for over ten hours straight - to the next minute squeegeeing the floor for a second time because “safety first” and I was waiting on my next task. Often it was a case of there being quite a lot to do, but having limited resources by which to do it - you can only have so many pallet jacks or forklifts on the floor at a time, for example.

While I always enjoy staying busy, there were a few times that the slower moments really paid off for me. Twice, Rob came to me with the news we were headed to the vineyards to check on grapes. On these rare occasions, I got Rob’s undivided attention for the hour or so round trip drive into the hills and back. He told me stories of winery owners, winemakers, property owners, and local farmers - where each had come from, who worked for whom at what juncture, how they got into the business, what their philosophies on wine were, and how they fit into the larger wine world of Willamette Valley. It was hard to keep the personalities straight, but the lessons were clear: the best way to learn how to make great wine is to work with others who already have; making wine is a hard job and not for someone who aspires to achieve fortune from the work; be nice because the wine community is small and incestuous and burning a bridge is a good way to remove yourself from the industry.

Arriving at the vineyards made it very clear why so many have wanted to be in this industry. Despite the frequent complaints I’d heard about Oregon weather, this week was perfect autumn - crisp, clear, colorful. I needed a light jacket, and definitely mud boots, but walking between rows of vines was truly divine. Many of the Willamette vineyards are bordered by forests - offering the sweet smell of damp wood and green things, and showing off the enormous oak trees that can be made into barrels that age wine to perfection. Birds, who can actually be annoying vineyard pests, sung sweetly from the trees instead of devouring the smorgasbord of grapes. I saw some quail flap over some shrubs onto the neighbors land, their little curlicues bouncing. The leaves of the vines had just begun to change color, individual plants hinting at gold upon my arrival and whole fields emanating a vibrant sunset color about two weeks later as I left. Each row of grapevines was bookended by rose bushes that act as a canary in a mine to premonate any disasters lurking in the soil, from pests to disease to bad weather. The best vineyards are located on east or west facing hills that capture the warmth from the rare Oregon sunlight and give you an expansive view of the valley.

Pinot Noir grapes freshly trucked in from the Vineyard

How charming to pick grapes off a vine, the sweet juice bursting through thin skins, then spit the seeds back out onto the ground. We’d pop grapes straight into our mouths - me relishing in the fruity goodness, and Rob carefully discerning if the grapes had enough density and complexity of flavor to be picked yet. Rob preferred to let the grapes hang until they had reached the peak of their flavor development. Once we had determined if a grape was ready based on taste, we’d squeeze the droplets of juice onto a refractometer to read the Brix, giving an approximation of the available sugar in the grape that could be converted to alcohol in the cellar. Rob seemed happy with the development of flavors in his grapes and was pleased with the quality of fruit in a season that was already showing some signs of weather damage.

Pinot Noir grapes on the vine with individual berry ripeness

If you thought pinot noir was pinot noir, it becomes very clear the nuances of the grape when you can taste distinct differences between the grapes even before it’s made into wine. From one block of vines to the next, Rob would point out the different clones of grapes. Paying attention, you could see that some clusters trended larger, others were tighter with smaller berries - these were different clones of Pinot Noir. Pinot Noir has a proclivity for small mutations, creating various clones of plants back home in their native Burgundy vineyards. When David Lett and his peers began planting Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley, the growers imported clones of vines that were known for having better tolerance towards a cool, damp climate, or vines that ripened earlier, or preferred the volcanic soils that feed much of the Valley. Today, not only can you taste the difference between a Dijon 667 and a 114 clone, but you could even taste a slight difference in ripeness between the vines on the east side of a trellis or on the west side - the riper ones faced the sun for longer.

Beyond that, each individual cluster had variance in flavor - in a single cluster you could have a light violet grape showing evidence of only recent veraison, a perfectly indigo, tight-skinned grape, and a blackish shriveled raisin-y like grape. Next to these varied clusters were smaller bunches with larger, lighter colored grapes that usually hung higher on the vine than the others. Rob indicated these were second crop - they developed on branches that had sprouted off of the main shoots of the vine, therefore developing slower, later and not as complex of fruit. The pickers would be careful to only select the fully ripe first crop bunches and to avoid anything that had evidence of mold, mildew, or a predominance of raisining. After a week or so, the pickers would make another pass to grab the second crop, which would likely be added to ferments or rosés that needed an extra boost of acidity, but not to the top wines of the vintage.

Once Rob was determined that the grapes were ready, but would be equally fine hanging for a few more days, we drove back to town, passing through the Dundee Hills where he used to work as Erath’s winemaker. He pointed out some other vineyards where he sources grapes, telling stories of each winery as we passed, as I idealized what it must be like for the lucky folks who got to live out here.

Several days later, this crop of grapes arrived at the winery, ready to be made into wine. A forklift would hover giant fruit bins above an enormous funnel while someone raked the bunches of grapes into the de-stemmer machine. Another harvest intern would monitor the fermenter under the machine to ensure the grapes fell into the new bin and to holler before it overflowed. When the bin was full, it would be carted off as a new bin was pushed through the opposite side to keep the line moving. On this day, I was tasked with managing the stream of grape stems that shot out the back of the de-stemmer - sometimes into another giant crate and sometimes all wonky onto the floor. Between loads, I’d hop into the bin stomping the stems down to try to fit in as many as possible before we were forced to stop the production line to use the forklift to empty the stem bin into the tractor trailer outside. The stems and any grapes that fell onto the floor would be hauled off to a local farm as a treat for the cows and pigs. In one day, our small team processed over 50 tons of grapes.

The day after, the bins we’d filled lined the warehouse in neat rows, accessible to us for daily care. As a chemist-in-training in a past life, I was drawn to the task of doing the morning Brix/Temps analysis where every lot of grapes on the floor was sampled, its temperature taken, and its sugar level recorded. A seasoned intern suggested early on that I should smell and taste everything, as it’s the best way to calibrate your senses to the numbers you’d pull in the analysis.

You can also catch problems early by being tuned in to the small communications of the ferment - is there a fault that needs to be corrected? Are the yeasts working? While I didn’t taste everything (I would have been there all day!) I did sample enough to follow the progression of the batch from juice to ferment to wine. I could start to guess where a sample would fall on its Brix level just by tasting. As the juice ran down my arm as I collected my sample, I could tell if the ferment had really kicked off by the warmth of the mess on my skin.

This early wine I tried was delicious and on several occasions I questioned why I didn’t buy grape juice from the grocery store when I wanted a non-alcoholic option, only later remembering that the bulk production, different species of grape, and the fact that it wasn’t a hand-tended craft product were only a few of the reasons. One pinot gris tasted so much like blood orange and grapefruit, it was hard to be convinced it was only grapes, though I saw it through its production. The color was sunset pink, and I could have drunk a jug of it - alcohol or not. I marked that one as a wine I’d order in a year or so once it was released. One of the Pinot Noirs tasted like fuchsia bubbles zipping around - the acidity was so clean, the fruit so pronounced, I could see how you’d know which lots of grapes would make truly amazing wine later in their lives. You could taste a remarkable difference between the base wine for the approachable bubbles versus the thoughtful, restrained, complex base that would turn into the high end Rosé D’Or. Although we de-stemmed almost all the Pinot Noir, some lots had more noticeable tannin, some more rustic earthiness, and some a total purity of fruit. These juices were delicious and fun to taste, but at the end of the day, they’re still just babies. This is where the magic happens turning juice to wine.

Finally, at the end of my two weeks, I was treated to a barrel tasting, where Rob and I walked around the warehouse cellar with fancy Oregon wine glasses and a barrel thief (used for gentle siphoning from a barrel), and I got to taste through last year’s vintages from the various vineyards I had visited earlier in the trip. The grape juice finally tasted like wine - great wine.

Tasting through the barrels in the cellar made it clear to me why wineries produce single vineyard wines. Yes, you can certainly manipulate a wine in the cellar to have certain characteristics, but how cool is it that the terroir of a certain vineyard - the microclimate, the grape clone, the aspect - make fruits that taste so different from each other. In a world of grocery store culture where any Gala apple tastes like a Gala apple, it’s amazing to taste such a remarkable difference between two grapes of the same variety that only were separated by a couple of miles. Winemakers often blend different vineyards and different clones to get a larger batch of more consistent juice - this year adding more of the tannic vineyard, next year needing a bit more of the tart acidity of another. Most of the wine people drink every day is like this - a sampling of vineyards from across a region. But, on a special occasion when you have the ability to upgrade to a single vineyard wine, know that you’re tasting the actual terroir from that place that the grapes once grew.

The same flavors you could taste in the live grapes from a particular vineyard and the same qualities you could discern from the fermenting vats of those same grapes led to identifiable nuances in the barrel. It’s impossibly mind-blowing to me.

That night at dinner, several R. Stuart Reserve single vineyard bottles graced our table, the finished product of vintages past. My tour of terroir was complete. I asked Rob to pass me the Menefee.

It Takes a Lot of Cold Beer to Make Good Wine

Studying for my Certified exam and opening a wine bar, you can imagine that I’ve been drinking a lot of wine lately. I like wine. No, I love wine. It makes food better, it’s elegant, it’s a great hostess gift. It’s perfect after a long day, refreshing on a hot day, and you can drink it in the morning if you add a splash of orange juice. It’s endlessly interesting to think about, and it has health benefits in moderation. Wine is the perfect drink.

Harvest Lager Delivery (photo courtesy of Deven Morganstern)

Over the past couple of years, I’ve almost completely given up drinking other types of alcohol. Cocktails are expensive and mediocre at best unless you’re at a top class joint. Beer is too filling and makes me feel puffy and bloated. I had all but given up drinking beer, to be honest, just not worth the calories.

At the winery, after a long day of hard work, and to wind down before dinner time, the R Stu Crew as they affectionately called themselves, would come into the office, sit around the lunch table, and have “beer thirty”. The first day as they all started cracking beers, I opted out, holding out for the wine I’d get at the house later. On the second day, I asked for just a sip -- there was a limited release Harvest lager made just for wine harvest in the valley that was a partnership between a local brewery, Visit McMinnville, and the winegrower association. On the third day, I popped my own can. And, on the fourth day, the crew took me to The Bitter Monk, the best beer joint in town and I easily put down a quick Octoberfest before dinner.

By day five and for the rest of my time in Oregon, beer thirty was an essential part of my daily routine. I craved the cold, dry hops, and a drink that wasn’t made from grapes. And, like the saying goes, “it takes a lot of cold beer to make great wine.”

The Container Store

The tops of Open Top Fermenters with Barrels in the background

In the world of winemaking, it could be argued that nothing is more necessary than containers. In the vineyard, fruit is picked into fruit bins (like a giant version of a blueberry tray from the grocery store - heavy plastic with long open slits for air circulation) or woodies (old fashioned wooden crates that are now lined with plastic to protect the fruit). From there, the fruit gets de-stemmed, with the woodies being slid over to catch the wasted stems, and the precious juice being funneled into a fermenter.

Lines of blue and green OTFs (One Ton Fermenters)

A fermenter could be an OTF - one ton fermenter - that holds about a ton of fruit. Ours were bright blue or aqua green and labeled with permanent marker giving them all unique number codes that the team could reference as we were making juice into wine. The fermenter might instead be a TTF - two ton fermenter - that was a cloudy white plastic and was taller, requiring a step stool to access the juice inside. Juice could be stored in a plastic IBC which is like a big cubic jug surrounded by a metal cage. If there was a large lot of grapes, they’d go into an enormous stainless steel container called an OT (different than an OTF) or Open Top fermenter.

After being pressed, the juice would move to one of several large stainless steel tanks, smaller WPTs (white plastic tanks), or neutral oak barrels labeled with white chalk. Frequently, the juice would be délestaged or racked, which essentially is just moving it from one container to another, and then back again to remove seeds or sediment. This isn’t even to mention the mountains of buckets, pitchers, hoses, test tubes, and cylinders that we used daily to hold small bits of wine for various purposes. These grapes saw a lot of different containers over their short lives. And, in between each movement amongst containers, the containers needed to be cleaned.

The final container of a wine’s life is the bottle, the most precious and smallest of the containers in the winery and the most familiar to all of us drinkers. Often clear or a lovely shade of green, these ultimate containers deliver wine to our tables in drinkable portions and elegant style.

“For every season, clean, clean, clean.”

— Rob Stuart

Barrels being cleaned (hot pressure spray from underneath)

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Musings on Making Wine, Part 1

On the pleasure of sharing a meal (and a bottle)