CRUSH:
UNMASKING THE GRAPE
By Jamie Relth
November 2006
First, you take the grapes
and you squish ’em.
I
never would have thought that
I might apply that old peanut
butter and jelly how-to analysis to the divine
art of winemaking. After all, as Robert Louis
Stevenson said, “Wine is bottled poetry.” To
investigate the magic behind this mystical nectar
was to venture into a mysterious dreamland where
fantasy and reality intertwine, and from which
I could never hope to return with clear-cut answers.
But the enigma of harvest – that time of
year when Dionysian festivals and rituals pop
up all over in grandiose displays of indulgence
and debauchery – intrigued me too much
to pass up the opportunity to step behind the
curtain and see how those magicians of the vines
coax the elusive elixir from the earth to our
bottles.
Opolo Vineyards welcomed me “backstage,” giving
me an introduction to several different
vineyards, large and small, from which
they source fruit
in addition to that harvested from their own 270 acres. The owners Rick Quinn
and David Nichols, residents of Camarillo, bought adjacent lots in Paso Robles
in pursuit of a dream hobby, which soon outgrew their amateur aims of selling
grapes. They now have an independent winery offering about twelve varietals
of their own estate wine, most notably a wonderful Mountain Zinfandel, and
an award-winning Rhapsody blend that exemplify the big, extracted, fruit-forward
style of Opolo wines.
Scott Welcher, General Manager at Opolo Vineyards, showed me the ropes, and
I followed along, trying to soak it all up. We reached the vineyard at about
8:30 a.m., after the pickers had already been gathering grapes for three hours,
before the hot Paso Robles sun emerged, forcing both man and grape to sweat
and struggle beneath it. I wondered how Scott and others knew when to pick
the grapes, and although he answered me with all the technical details, I saw
that he seemed to judge simply by finely tuned senses. Like some kind of vineyard
shaman, he snagged grapes periodically and popped them in his mouth to get
a status report of the vines. He probably could not imagine the undiscerning,
bewildered state of my mind while he pointed out the subtle differences in
the berries and leaves as we whizzed by them on a four-wheeler.
After my whirlwind tour, I rolled up my sleeves and got down to work helping
a crew of pickers finish off the last few rows of Viognier. The crew leader
gave me my own scissors and a yellow bucket – about 40 pounds when it
was full of grapes – which was to be dumped into the half-ton crates
pulled along by the tractor. The pickers (about 10 in all, fully covered with
black pants, thick sweatshirts, bandanas, and hats) shot curious glances at
me, smiling at my uncertainty and clumsiness as they skillfully wielded their
mini-machetes and scurried around me. They moved tirelessly, knowing that their
wages were directly related to the weight of the grapes picked that day. Unfortunately,
when the whims of the gods make for a light harvest, as they did this year
with the Viognier, the pickers get the short end, as well.
As Scott said later, “It’s hard to believe how much work’s
involved – how much these grapes have to go through to make wine.” He
was right; the sun-scorched reality behind the art and sophistication of
wine looked back at me with a dark, sweaty, mustached face and a big white
cowboy hat. Rather than a wand or spell, conjuring wine involves driving tractors,
lugging buckets, and stacking crates. Yet the fruits of the labor are poured
and consumed in the luxury of leisure, merriment, and triviality, by those
who probably never imagine – as I never did – the hard work that
went in to making such a jovial juice.
My next stop was not so hard on my fingers or on my heartstrings; I changed
hats and became a chemist. Although I did not stomp grapes with my feet, I
did get to taste the satisfaction of bludgeoning the juice out of them. We
were testing Brix levels (or the ratio of dissolved sucrose to water in a liquid)
from two different sides of a particular vineyard. Brix, a buzzword of winemaking
that soon came rolling off my tongue, relates directly to the percentage of
alcohol that the wine will contain after fermentation. I filled a cylinder
with freshly squished juice and dropped a hydrometer into it to measure the
amount of sugar in the solution, usually around 20–25 Brix at harvest
time. This test, though, can be skewed by the amount of debris (grape skins
or seeds) caught in the mixture, while a refractometer measures the same thing
more accurately by determining the fluid concentration of dissolved sugar,
based on its refractive index. We performed this process for both samples and
then went on to do an acid test, measuring the ph-levels as compared to the
amount of Tartaric Acid (the major acid in grapes). When the juice shows the
right balance of ph and acid, it’s time to harvest.
I felt like I had found a hidden wing of Willy Wonka’s factory when we
entered the cellar door, where the grapes are unloaded and dumped, crate by
crate, into either the destemmer or the press, depending on their type. White
wines, like Viognier, do not need to spend time being crushed and fermented
with their skins; they move straight from the fields to a press – a huge
metal barrel-shaped machine that squeezes the juice out of the grapes. With
the reds, the process is more complicated, resulting in a likewise more complex
taste. The cellar crew first destemmed the grapes, by a machine that sends
the clusters spinning every direction, spitting out the stems one way and dropping
the fruit another. A crusher mashes up the fruit and funnels all this must into
a hose that leads to a tank where the fermentation occurs. The “cap” of
skins and other grape residue floats over the juice, and in order to make the
juice mingle with the pigment-carrying skins, they either push down the cap
or circulate the juice through it with hoses. Yeast, that unicellular “pixie
dust,” converts the sugar to alcohol.
I tasted the wines in the tasting room adjoining their cellar when we were
done (for journalistic purposes, of course) and enjoyed that luxury of time,
reflection, and indulgence. I could not look at the wine with the same carefree
illusions as before, but neither could I strip it of its romantic enigma. As
I savored the day and the wine (especially the full-bodied fruit and spice
of the Mountain Zinfandel, topped off with the luscious Late Harvest Zinfandel
with a couple bites of rich, dark chocolate) I tasted the distinct flavors – nutmeg,
black cherry, plum, raspberry – and felt the burden of thousands of berries,
lovingly nurtured and painstakingly processed to create my dram of wine. What
I once imagined to be a brew of art, alchemy, and chance, turned out to be,
like so many wonderful things in life, the product of honest, hard work and
determination. Yet I was uplifted by the delicate delights of the wine, largely
due to the brilliance – not of a wizard or sage – but of Mother
Nature, at her finest. Harvest wasn’t so glamorous a discovery as I had
expected, but I am surprised by how much more profoundly I appreciate that “magic
juice” in my bottle than before.
OPOLO
VINEYARDS
7110 Vineyard Drive, Paso Robles
open daily: 11 a.m.–5 p.m.
(805) 238-9593
www.opolo.com
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