Whew. Sometimes the week just blows past - this one was no exception for sure! We have been taking in fruit all week - Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay mostly from a few vineyards in the area. Things have gone mostly smoothly - first trucks show up around 4am, we load and run the press, and then the next set of trucks shows up at 7am with cold, freshly picked fruit and we repeat. We are pretty much cleaned up on the crush pad and done by noon most days, with the night crew coming in to do tank racking and yeast additions to the juice.
We have been bottling a little bit here and there, both our own wines, as well for clients, which is really tough. It is always difficult to be finishing some wines while dealing with new juice - you have to keep a totally separate set of pumps, hoses, and equipment to avoid contaminating one with the other, etc... We are bottling as fast as we can to avoid the dreaded "checkmate" of not having a tank to go into when it is needed. As you can see from the photo, we are approaching critical mass - we are playing a pretty tough game of chess with dry erase markers, trying to map out our next move. Making it even tougher, our entire red wine fermentation room is currently under construction, getting set up to have tank warming and cooling available to every single tank (a really great quality step forward, but we are at the mercy of the plumbing company!) I am told that the room should be available to us next week, but until then we are really tight.
We have just started to barrel down our first barrel-fermented Chardonnays - the first is a Steinbeck vineyard block from our neighbors just across the fenceline to the south. As the sweet, just inoculated juice fills the barrels, the sweet, oaky air is displaced, filling the cellar with caramel and toasty oak aromas. Harvest is definitely here!
More harvest photos here
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