a window opens...

Today was my final day at Keever Vineyards. My job is done. It is complete. The juice is all safe inside the barrels, and I said my goodbyes {{big sigh...}}

So much can be seen, learned and experienced in 4 months, and I can honestly say, these have been days of extreme growth for me. Whenever you put yourself in uncomfortable & foreign situations, you start to change and if you look very carefully, you can see yourself opening your eyes a little wider to the massive world and all its magic.

This job, just like any other, has become part of my life now, my story, my history. The things I did and saw at the winery will forever affect the way I see wine as a part of the world and how it fits in our culture. I know that wine is so much more complex to make than majority of people think it is, because I did it. Of course, my experience working a harvest is very specific to me and the other factors of my life, but I can confidently say that this is a HARD job for anyone.

Most importantly, this experience has brought me to a whole new level of obsession for wine. It is magical. The entire transformation, the scientific processes, the grapes that each have a personality, the tanks that house them, the hoses pumping the juice, the bugs that are dying to get into every crevice and drink it, the barrels that smell like a wet forest floor, the coolness and darkness of caves, the people who lovingly spend their lives devoted to this beverage, this culture, this life.

Thankfulness does not amply describe the feeling that consumes me on this last day of my life at the winery. I am overjoyed to have spent so many mornings, afternoons and evenings at Keever Vineyards, where I tried so hard to soak up every drop of information, the processes and theories that allow us to make mind-blowing wine.

As I transition to another job and open another chapter of my life, I will close this one forever, but never forget the moments that really challenged my body and mind.

I wonder what harvest will be like next year...

Signing off, the girl and the grape bids you many happy harvests to come. Thanks for reading my journey of "THE HARVEST: juicy stories from a wine intern"


Cheers,

the traveling grape

the cycle from grape to glass continues, as our red grapes evolve and change every day and get closer to becoming delicious wine.

after weeks of all-day TLC given to the grapes (via Pumpovers 3x a day!) the sugar levels have finally dropped to almost dry, which means it is time to drain the tanks and press the grapes! {{the next step later this week: transfer to our french barrels!}}

this also means, sarah gets to climb inside the tanks and shovel. cardio workout here i come!!!

it was SO cold today in napa, as the dark grey billowing clouds loomed over the valley, and it started to sprinkle. after emptying out some tanks and spraying them with scalding hot water from the inside, (which created a nice, momentary sauna effect that felt SO good) i was drenched and freezing. oh, dont worry, i spent 20 intimate minutes with a hair dryer to go from sopping to damp, to make the remainder of the day bearable. how did i forget my extra clothes on THIS day!?

this step is really fun, but i am physically exhausted from it. my sleep (and next paycheck) will be well deserved. (and im sorry i have no energy for correct punctuation or capitalization today; maybe tomorrow...)

Main Course

" Looks like on the agenda today we have...Pumpovers. Pumpovers. Pumpovers. A Screen and Tub. Sprinkler. Firehose. Sanitize. Rinse. Water push. Fermentation Monitoring. Check heater. Check glycol. Surprise juice shower!!!"

That is the daily production jargon and string of tasks invading my life, 7 days a week. We are now in the thick of production, after harvesting our entire estate plus our outsourced vineyards within a couple of action-packed days. Every morning, a new block of fruit came in with a whole new personality, look and feel. Some grapes were beautiful, round, firm skinned, juicy, perfection. Other grapes were shriveled, pebble-like, disfigured, rotten, nibbled on, gross. I touched them all. I got to stand on the front lines, the first position on the sorting table, so I really did get to see every grape come in, grab them, roll them around and discerningly decide if the clusters were good enough. Judgment day for grapes. The cabernet going into the Corra cab was perfection, along with our Syrah from the Page Nord vineyard.

There was so much variation from block to block, row to row, and even picker to picker. Chris said that since hired grape pickers are paid by the ton, the sneaky ones don't care if they put in the occasional rock, handful of leaves, or dry stems just to increase the weight!!! How rude.


During grape sorting, we found a small golf-size pencil, some green vineyard tape, and a precious little blue bellied lizard who was head down in a cluster of cabernet (not a bad place to be really, UNLESS he was not spotted and thrown into the destemmer!)

This is the main course of this experience for me, the apex, the climax, the sha-bang, the pulp. I am exhausted and look pretty gnarly with my matted wet hair slopped back into a pony tail or uneven braids, grey stained skin, and a half-awake smile. BUT, this is the way life is right now, and the wine that is going to emerge after this is over is more than worth my bitching.

Cheers,

October Photo Reel

Cheers,

Picking Up Speed

Early Tuesday morning we arrived rested and ready to receive our first harvest of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes; our baby, our flagship. It is always a little scary and nerve racking the morning of harvest because you simply don't know how the day is going to go, and just HOPE that the hours won't be too brutal on your body and mental well-being.

And then, just as I started to get too anxious, the gorgeous Napa sunrise started to communicate a message to me..."here you go, this is what you've been waiting for... so now go soak it in and enjoy."

I did in fact drink in every last drop of that day. I sorted grapes for half the day on our vibrating sorting table, watching whole clusters of rich dark purple grapes bounce along while I squished, squeezed and pulled searching for the best most plump berries. Even though 2010 is considered to be a mild year in terms of heat, it was sad to see so many berries fall victim to the sun's vigor that has occurred over the last couple days.

After a satisfying and successful first day working with Cabernet, I started to feel better about my purpose here in Napa and as an intern. Just like the hot air balloons I see every morning, you need to add a little burst of fire sometimes to propel yourself back up to see the beautiful world around you more clearly and gain perspective.

I am now proficiently performing pump-overs. The hardest part of this task is setting up the pump correctly and then finding a way to stand over the tank so that your back doesn't go out from exhaustion! I am very sore today, and I have never had so many random bruises, but I'm pretty happy to have had my hands on so many grapes this week.

Cheers,

Fall is in the air

It is fall in Napa.

The air has rapidly cooled to completely crisp this week. It is almost too chilly to keep your bedroom window open at night, but the first step out the door in the morning is shockingly refreshing and exciting.

Every street is bustling with signs of harvest. Beat up old trucks parked wherever is convenient for hauling bins, full containers of fruit being carried down the highway, and most exciting, vines bursting with ripe fruit is covering valley floor.

At Keever, patience is more than a virtue, it is a steadfast policy. Until our grapes are PERFECTLY ripe, we aren't picking a single berry.

We are all getting anxious, stir crazy, a little aggravated, but the reality is that the quality of our wine is the most important thing, especially when you make such few cases and plan to sell it all.

At the winery, we are keeping ourselves busy any way we can. We got our second block of Sauvignon Blanc grapes from the Jonquil vineyard last week, so that certainly occupied some time, but is nothing compared to what the red is going to do to our days.

Still waiting, still smiling...

Cheers,

Same Passion, Different Perspective: Miner Family intern, & my dear friend, Jenny Brown beautifully dishes on her endeavor in the valley.

I am a wine maker.

Ruby juice drips through my fingers and splatters my shirt during the pumpover. I taste the grenache... 7 days in tank, 4 days into fermentation, and the few berries that are left are the sweetest, most delicious, effervescent berry bombs of flavor. oh my god. It is happening. What I have been working and waiting for and it is just the beginning.
I am making wine.
Over the past 7 weeks I have moved from Sacramento to Napa, jumping tracks from wine retail to production, and I have been absorbing the behind the scenes cellar action of a 25,000 annual case production winery as if I was the driest sponge. (now moist. just for you mitchell.) As a harvest cellar worker for Miner Family Winery, I have been working with a well versed crew to prep and pamper the winery for this season’s crush.

I am absolutely freaking IN LOVE.

I’ve cleaned up bat poo, topped barrels with wine, sulfured barrels, power washed a plethora of bins (which I loved…felt like Rambo for a week and scored a sweet farmer tan!) sanitized tanks, hand polished the presses (over 16 hours of wax on/wax off), lugged hoses, cleaned, mastered a one-hand clamp, busted butt on the bottling line, bull-dogged wine from barrels, cleaned equipment, racked wine off the lees, measured and calibrated tanks, cleaned, saved frogs, combined chemicals, electricity and water, cleaned, crushed, perfected pumpovers (well, almost), learned to drive a fork-lift (and hell yes I am down for a fork-lift rodeo! yee haw!), shoveled rotting fruit, climbed into fermentation tanks and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned…


All in preparation for this day.
This first witness of change, the beautiful berries beginning their transformation into delicious, enticing, mature wine. Wine - a labor of love which begets love. Love unto others, love of the earth, love of this life.

The sugars are going down and alcohol levels are starting to rise….


Oh, and I learned that you can actually SEE carbon dioxide. Shimmering in the air... blurring the distant view like a mirage in the desert. (Then I was told not to stand with my head over the open tank.)

a slow, delicate progression

It is the day after our first harvest...

the machines turned off, the large room full of clanging steel and loud water hoses quiets, the extra help goes home...and then there is silence throughout the winery. EXCEPT for the murmuring whispers of mingling yeast.

After making what I call the dough (mixing dry yeast with liquid to rehydrate it), we stood around and listened to it snap, crackle and pop. The yeast was going crazy, just so hungry for sugar and ready to poop out alcohol. oh yes. But, it really does smell like baking bread...





We then inoculated the juice by gently adding the starving yeast to the tank of sauvignon blanc grape juice. Those little guys shut up, and started their feast in our lovely tanks. We shortly thereafter transferred all the juice (already starting to become wine!!!) into barrels and lovingly tucked them in the dank cave to hibernate.

Since then, we have been going out to the cave every morning to perform fermentation monitoring, where we take the temperature of the juice and use a hydrometer to see what the sugar is at. Sugars go down, temp goes up...with the anticipated result being stablization in a couple weeks with little/no change.

The smell of fermentation is delicious. P.S. don't stick your nose in a sulfured barrel, just sayin'...

Day 1

I had almost forgotten what I was doing here in Napa; where my passion for wine came from, what winemaking is all about, and the back-to-basics of cultivating something from the earth...

...but today it all came back to me. HARVEST HAS BEGUN!!!

Our first lot of precious estate-grown Sauvignon Blanc grapes were lovingly picked by Barbour Vineyard Team, (arguably the best in the valley) in the wee morning hours, and dropped at our feet to begin the process.

Wide-eyed and more overly estastic than usual, I watched as the tender light-yellow and green grapes were forklifted up to where our magical receiving system is. And then all of a sudden... WOOSH! Grapes were dumped onto the sorting table that I stood at, and we began furiously hand sorting through clusters with lighting speed. You dont even have time to really think when you are sorting because the shaker table is moving the clusters along to the destemmer so fast, your mind becomes a stream of consciousness with single thoughts...

Look. Bad. Good. Okay. Toss. Push. Eww! Bug in my Hair! Leaf. Twig. Bug! Water berry. Sun burnt. Perfect.

I was honored to be sorting with a group of essentially all women. In company was the dynamic Keever mother-daughter duo, and standing right next to me was winemaker Celia Welch!!! (as in 'my idol', as in 2008 Food & Wine magazine Winemaker of the year!!!) Needless to say, I was starstruck and her fabulous assistant also sorted with us.


A couple hours of sorting was over in a blink. On to the next steps involving the tanks, dry ice, shoveling, hoses, clamps...all kinds of fun stuff. Our system is very very efficient and gets the job done with as little stress on the fruit as possible. The remainder of the day was devoted to making it look like nothing even happened at the winery today...ah yes, cleaning! A fabulous workout and stress reliever but also got me completely soaked to the bone and exhausted beyond belief.

After hours of getting the most desirable berries and their juice ready, the happy family of grapes from our vineyard is currently snuggled together and relaxing in their new home inside the tank. From the sip of straight grape juice that I slurped from a wine glass, (which tasted like fine granulated sugar-coated pear and apricot) I can tell this is going to be another amazing vintage at Keever.

So happy, so tired, so ready for more...Cheers!

Staying inside the staves

Instead of paper, we use barrels. Instead of crayons, we use grape concentrate. Instead of "staying inside the lines", we stay inside the staves. Oh yes, today was one I have been anxiously awaiting...barrel painting day!

A mixture of grape concentrate, vodka (Gordon's, what else!?), citric acid and the least precious of our precious wine, all mixed together to create a stain so beautiful Picasso would be proud to use it. The goal of this mixture is to make a stain that we paint on the middle wooden section of the barrel, (called a stave) to make our cave aesthetically pleasing. The composition of the mixture doesn't allow mold or any other crazy disease to fester on or in the barrels and doesn't contaminate the finished wine.

Instead of using paintbrushes like some wineries, we just used cloths to saturate and smooth the stain over the middle stave of the barrel. We cautiously wore rubber gloves for this job, but that hardly mattered when it came to staying clean. The inside of my forearms were tie-dyed with swipes of the purple stain to create a nice massive bruise effect. Sadly, real bruises did form on my knees and shins from kneeling down to paint the underside of the barrels. My boss said "if you don't get bruises from cellar-work, you're doing something wrong".

8 hours of beautifying our barrels and we were almost done. Chris and I had a conversation that somehow led to the creation of "rat language" (get the reference, cellar rat!?). Apparently I start to loose my marbles after 8 hours of no sunlight. It was a blast, and the rat squeaking and laughing got us through this gnarly day of wine painting.

UNDER PRESSURE!

SO much pressure....WATER pressure that is!

Today was comprised of approximately 5 hours of pressure washing Macro bins (1/2 ton of grapes capacity) and T bins (1 ton of grapes capacity). To do this, I hooked up a hose to our awesome pressure washing machine, activated the long nosed pressure gun, and sprayed every square inch of the bins. I got to rock out to my ipod while wearing a sexy yellow rain suit and look out onto the valley and think about life. It was the perfect day for self reflection and to appreciate the tedious yet satisfying tasks given to me.

For the remaining part of the day, I got to hop onto the fork lift and transfer sanitizing solution from container to container then stack up the bins. Petal to the metal is my motto! I'm thinking about rocking a bumper sticker that says "my other ride is a fork lift."

A fun little surprise was when Chris and I got to try some odd Japanese cookies that some tourists left; I described them as "Nilla-wafer like, with hints of zucchini bread and dog biscuit"....certainly interesting and kinda good if you are really starving. We also found a stash of gourmet popcorn that somehow got to the winery; Caramel fleur de sel, Black truffle salt with cheddar, and ginger sesame seed caramel are just a few of the flavors. Savory and sweet snacks are SO essential during the day to keep me going. I am realizing that I need to eat a lot more frequently when doing this type of work, not only to satisfy my body that is burning more calories but my mind needs a break too. At this point in the game I am bringing super healthy snacks and lunch with me to work, but the taco truck down the street is starting to look really tempting...

We were also told that S. Blanc grapes will be pushed back until next wednesday :( Thats okay, just more time to get this winery in sparkling condition just to get it all dirty again!

Now, cocktail time :)

the best part of the day

as i wandered down rows of pale yellow green Sauvignon Blanc grapes in the afternoon haze high above the valley, i picked a few berries from a cluster. i popped them in my mouth, let the grape skin gently break under my teeth, and rolled the pulp in my cheeks. they tasted like fresh green figs and juicy pears. it was so satisfying and exciting to know that these will become liquid gold in a couple weeks...

getting tan, scrubbing bins, wet feet

Fucking Yellow Bins---yeah, you heard me...

the "FYB's" (technical industry term for Fucking Yellow Bins) came in last week and our task towards the end of today was to get all the caked dirt/dust and left over grape particles off of them. They are smallish, rectangular, 40lb capacity bins that high end wineries use to give to the vineyard team to put the berries in when they are ripe and ready to be processed.

So-with our high pressure hoses and white scrubby pads, Chris and I went to work. We developed a system where Chris sprays the bins off, lines them up by the sanitation tank which is a macro-bin (that I used the fork lift to move! yay!) that is filled with peracetic acid cleaning solution, where then i proceed to use brushes and scrubbies to get them clean! We finally give them one more rinse in a clean water bin and stack them up neatly onto palates--- A VERY complicated process (hear the sarcasm?), but an important one nonetheless.

It kinda felt like playing in a wading pool at age 5. I got SOAKED from splashing around the tanks and the yellow bins look like water play buckets. My feet acquired a level of shriveling that I have only seen after hours of bathing and my shoulders are bronzed more than a native Hawaiian's. To be honest, I LOVE being outside doing this kind of work. My body gets tired, my mind gets clear, and I get in the 'zone'. I get to blast John Mayer outside and look out onto Napa Valley and to me, I'm not sure there is anything better. It was also really fun once my delirium set in I started talking to Chris about high school cheerleading days and how i essentially ditched senior year in exchange for trips to Tahoe with my best friend. Gossiping while doing this kind of redundant work makes the time fly.

In 2 hours we got through 3/4 of a palate's worth of FYB's (keep in mind, we have about 5 palates of FYB's!!!) SO, tomorrow the same process will continue. Fruit is coming next week (fingers crossed), so I am going to do my best to enjoy the rest of this prep work and soak up the sunshine.

Here's to FYB's and F.G.D's (fucking good days).

cellar kitten, fork lift driver extraordinare, bat excavator

My first couple days as a 'harvest tech' or 'cellar kitten' (rather than intern or cellar rat) have been eventful and full of things to learn. I am submerged into a facet of this industry that I am not yet completely familiar with, and it is very challenging to switch gears from sales and customer service to production and physical labor. This is EXACTLY the kind of raw experience I am looking for and hope it will deepen my appreciation for an industry I am already obsessed with.

For those interested in what goes on behind a small winery's door, please check out what we have been doing to get geared up for the harvest. There is so much preliminary stuff to get done before the main event, and even the small cleaning tasks are vital to creating a quality wine, such as Keever.

Just to make it easy to understand, I will list the things I have done, and then briefly explain them:

-Siphoning wine into smaller containers using tubes, mouth suction, and gravity to transfer juice; siphoning is a method we use to carefully and gently transfer juice from container to container and then it eventually makes it in into a wood barrel that is already full of previous vintage wine (see topping off below). a rule of thumb is the smaller the container the better to eliminate oxygen exposure. we take a small tube (1 in' diameter, like 8ft long), stick one end in the container (we start with large kegs or 6 gallon glass vessels) and stick the other end into a smaller container (like 3 gallon, 1 gallon, or even a 750 ml). We use suction to get the juice flowing and CAREFULLY transfer the wine. it is really easy to spill everywhere so practice is key! note: you use your thumb to stop the wine flow when it gets close to the top, and lets just say ive sprayed myself a couple times already ;)

-Topping off barrels; when a wine is put into a barrel to age, it naturally begins to evaporate, so every once and awhile the barrel needs to be filled up to make up for the newly created space at the top to prevent oxidation of the wine. the same wine that is aging in the barrels is kept on reserve in glass vessels to add to the barrels when needed (see above). taking wine that has been siphoned into a small pitcher and going around to each barrel, taking off the bung (the cap to the barrel), and free pouring the juice into the barrel so that it is filled to the very top. This makes up for evaporation, (also preciously referred to as the "angel's share") and is done every couple weeks to eliminate the oxygen space in the barrel. Some juice overflows, but thats ok! It just adds to the beautiful wine stained barrel.

-Fork Lift training; jump onto forklift, adjust forks up/down/left/right/forward/backward/ lift sh*t and move it around, play "quarter" game and win! drive around using mad Rhonda driving skills with uncanny accuracy.

-Palate Jack training; VERY similar to fork lift training, except these electric machines (or manual ones) are much harder to control. The turns are wide and awkward, but when you stand on the palate jack and press the "Rabbit" button, that baby can really pick up speed! Also another fun, yet slightly um, dangerous toy.

-Remove bats; using water hoses, banging on roof with feet, using argon gas tanks...um yeah, a group effort to get these scary, ugly but intriguing animals OUT of the winery area (at the height of this experience, 22 bats flew out over my head, i almost cried)

-Gather grape samples; using our vineyard block map, we walked to 2 different block sites on our property (we have a small but beautiful 6 acres on site) and gathered samples of Sauv blanc grapes by a"TOP, MIDDLE, BOTTOM, BACK" method of randomization to collect a sample that gives us a good representation of how the clusters are maturing.

-Lab work; by CAREFULLY using lab equipment we can measure and gauge Brix (sugar), pH and TA (acid) levels of the grape samples gathered to see what stage the grapes are in, whether they are ripe and ready for harvesting or if they need more hang time (note: the jargon used in the lab is slightly confusing to me, and i vow to work on it and understand more in the coming weeks) I should have taken chemistry!

-Cleaning sorting tables, screens, destemmer, elevator and catch bowls: Our receiving system (the place in the winery where the grapes come in, in different size bins) is where the fun really begins. There is a nice line of different steel machines that work in perfect harmony to sort out the good from the bad berries, allows us to pick out non-grape material (like snakes, spiders, rocks, who knows...) , then gently separates the grapes from the stems. After going to ANOTHER line for second inspection, the grapes finally pour down into a tank from the second story to the first like a purple waterfall.

I am leaving ALOT out here, but will talk more later about receiving once we actually get grapes in!!!

So---it is ME, my trusty and seasoned companion Cellar Worker Chris, and Jason Keever the owner's Son right now as the team. Other Keever family members drop in regularly to give tours and help with general maintenance.

The adventure has only JUST begun! Stay tuned.

the grapes are beckoning...

In just a couple weeks, the journey will begin!

Looking forward to getting my hands dirty, bleeding grape juice, and shaking up my life like a snow-globe.

Stay tuned...