We Stomped

The Day to stomp those wine grapes.
Inevitably, the day rolled around. We had confirmation the grape was coming and that it would arrive by 9a.m. Anton, marty and Mike E arrived from 8a.m. and we didn't really know whether 9a.m. meant just that or would it be later, and if later, how much later. Although I keep saying there's an inevitability about all this, there's a fair amount of unpredictability too. I wouldn't go so far as to say, "chaos" though.
Anyway, there we were, round the back when someone says theey say a white truck go by. Only 8.30. Too good to be true. Ignore it. But then thereit comes again, so Anton heads on up the drive to attract its attention. And so the truck arrived - early.
The weather. For the past 3 seasons, the weather had always behaved for us. That was because we worked almost exclusively in the basement and had little need to be outside. This year, as we planned to do all sorting and crushing outside, it was forecast to have rain and hail. Nice. This was why we decided to unload the wine grape into the garage out of the rain. We also set up in the garage doorways a sorting table and trash drum, so people could sort through the grape out of the rain and hail.
At this point we didn't know whether the one man and his truck had any equipment to ease the burden of dealing with 7 different grape varietals (weighing 13,500lbs). Would we have to labour carrying them from truck to garage? Well, not only was the truck on time, but there was some equipment too! The truck had a tail-lift and a hydraulic jack to deal with the pallets of grape.
The whole of the truck was dedicated to our order. This is quite a watershed for us. We had to take the grape off in the order they came but once in the garage we managed to end up grouping them by varietal so we could then deal with them a varietal at a time.
And so the day's Stomp began.
This was our procedure.
a) Choose the varietal to Stomp.
b) sort through 15 cases of it - hand cleaning off leaves, dried out grape, furry molds and mean little green grape.
c) load it up into the front loader of the tractor and the rear mower deck. With the front loader, we lined it with plastic sheeting first and arranged it such that excess plastic doubled as a rain cover if we found ourselves transporting it in the rain and hail.
d) drive tractor to crusher
e) load crusher
f) inform pumping crew in the basement which varietal was coming down
g) crush grape
h) ensure the crushed grape ends up in the correct drum.
And so on and so forth.
We didn't know whether the pump would work well, but it did. A couple of times saw us having to clear the destemmer from the crusher as it got blocked by excess pulp. Clearing this is not for the faint hearted as it is a very sharp contraption and loves slicing fingers. In fact, if it wasn't a grape destemmer it would make an ideal potato chipper or slicer-and-dicer of other vegetable things.
We found a new use for the stems. As the tractor went back and forth with its deliveries, it began to form muddy ruts. The stems made an excellent, durable roadway for the tractor. When I went to clear it up on the day after, I found I could hardly rake them so entwined with the grass, mud and each other they were. It also had the added bonus of providing excellent drainage as they're very springy and wouldn't crush down under the weight of the tractor. I then though of those cob houses they build from mud and straw. I think grape stems would make a better material than straw as the ends where the grape berry is attached is a nodule and each nodule has its own smaller stem, so its more like interwoven fiberglass. But we made excellent use of the grape road instead.
We had many guests turn up to join us through the day. Several uninvited guests turned up to, the Black Widow spiders. Yes, they were Black Widows, they were black, not brown and had that red hourglass. Due to the severe lack of a California climate, they were all docile. Marty found the first in the bunch he was cleaning. He held out the grape bunch and there was the spider nestling between the berries. Of course we got a glass jar and kept it. Before long it had company. Then later on Jerry found one on a discarded crate and in his truck. Sue then found one on her, as did Anton when he got home. No spider was harmed - of the ones we found anyway. I didn't find any. I may have eaten them.
This was the first time we had found any. Makes you wonder just how much of them gets into the end product! If this year was meant to be typical, it stands to reason the wine in prior years just consumed them. I suppose the colder Ohio winter will deal with any that the wine didn't get.
Of our human guests, we had;
Joe and Scott
John and Julie
James and Mary
Martha and Kevin
Mr and Mrs Huster
Hoelger and Will
Sue, Susan and Cory
Katrina
Jerry
And Mike's Realtor (sorry, forgot his name)
Their duties were almost exclusively to sort through and clean up the grape. At some point some food got laid out with wine.
It was particularly pleasing to see James there. James was an essential contact to making this scale of operation possible this year. My stint at the Sorrenti Winery in PA last year, revealed the little known fact that wineries make use of any container they get. The container used too supplement their regular stock was food grade drums in which juices came in. Well it so happens that James has access to an unfeasibly large amount of these drums and permits us to take them. This not only keeps our costs way down, but in the form of the drum we get either a primary or secondary fermenter (see previous posts for their pics and how we adpated them for primary use).
James said he could think of no better use for them and was pleased that they were being recycled in this way.
Mr and Mrs Huster were there too. They had done this before and are obviously the source of Mike's and Marty's wine making knowledge and experience. Mr huster is experimenting with our wine. He's got a couple of bottles of our SanGiovese/Pinot Noir blend from 2004 and he's going to see how long they keep. We do not sulfite the wine so any experiential feedback is very welcome.
We are also grateful to their contribution of the stainless steel sink (see previous post with pics), which really came into its own on stomp day.
We managed to partially recycle the grape cases. Jerry loaded up his truck with as many as he could, together with some of the pallets and later on took them down to the folks who camp out in the woods by the railway tracks.
Of course, Joe played piano and we sang a bit.
Now, the real stomping.
It was about the middle of the afternoon when the requests for stomping peaked. At that point we moved a platform to the back, set up two black stompers and laid out a couple of cases of grapes. Sofia and Cory braved the cramp inducing cold of the grapes ( a distinct disadvantage of dealing with grapes being trucked in cold storage from CA) together with Kevin, Sue, Susan , Cynthia, Martha and myself. They were bloody cold! However, there ain't a Salon nor Spa that can give as good a foot massage as throse grapes can when you stomp them.
Sue also brought a piece of material that she dyed in the grape juice. We look forward to the creation that will come out of this.
That's basically the stomp day.
Everyone got into their rythm and refined or developed technoques. And the wine ended up in the primary fermenters. No added sugars nor yeasts.
Then there was clean up.
Oh, by the way, it did hail.
A few select pics follow.
My next post will be about progress of the wine from just juice sitting there to a bubbling beauty.