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).