Quick Update

Sorry for not posting the past few days. I am deep in harvest now and time, motivation, and energy are all short at the end of the day. My problem now is that I can't even recall what I did on Monday. This is Thursday! Focus, Tim...

Okay here's a quick synopsis of the week so far.

Monday: I welded up some new hooks for the Lugger tool (see earlier post). I broke one of the original prototypes which was probably 12 years old. The new ones are beefy and work great. I really need to market these things... Then I cleaned lugs. I used a pressure washer to loosen and a big bin of water to rinse with excellent and fast results. I was cleaning 5 lugs per minute on average. That's pretty fast which is good as it is a miserable job. Then the Karcher brand pressure washer broke. I've used it like 3 times... I put the lugs out in the vineyard preparing for harvest on Tuesday.

Tuesday: Daniel and crew, 8 all together, picked 5 tons of chardonnay. This fruit was for me just as a change of pace (joke). They had to leave a lot of fruit on the vine due to rot, probably 25%. There are lots of kinds of rot. This year, at Cardinal Point anyway, there has been near perfect conditions for botrytis, or "noble rot." Botrytis is a fungal disease that usually infects grapes in the late ripening stage. It can lead to complete loss of a crop. It is not all that bad though. On its own, botrytis infected grapes develop pleasing flavors and actually increase in sugar because the fungi dehydrate the berries. The pathogen can cause enological (wine making) problems, especially with red varieties, but with care, can actually make wines superior compared to unifected lots, hence "noble rot". Botrytis, though can also lead to secondary rots, ripe rot, sour rot, and others, that smell and taste terrible. So, the fruit came in looking, well, bad, covered with brown, furry botrytis and who knows what else. It did not smell bad, though. There's hope...Later I took the Karcher pressure washer back to Lowe's and they gave me a new one!

Wednesday: We, Roberto and I, pressed out the Chardonnay picked on Tuesday. Many wineries sort their fruit before going pressing. This is a great concept. The idea is to pick out the bad clusters, berries, or bird nests before they are squished into wine. In practice this is can be tough to do. First, it is is difficult to find "sorters," people who do the sorting. Usually a winery uses their picking crew to sort. I find this funny. You pay a crew to pick fruit and then ask them to take out the stuff you don't want. I just ask them not to pick the stuff I don't want. Plus, it's tough to get people to sort when others need them to pick. More difficult is deciding what to sort. I know of a winery that sorted one bin out of six bins of fruit. On a lark, they pressed and vinified the ugly, sorted fruit. As you might guess by now, the "sorted" wine was far superior, full of flavor, rich with complexity. Don't get me wrong. Sorting can be a great tool. In this case, though, with my botrysized chardonnay, it wouldn't have. I wouldn't know what to pick out without snorting and tasting every berry. The infected fruit is very tender and the first juice to come out of the press are these easily pressed grapes. In this instance, this first, "free run" juice was remarkably sweeter than the juice later in the press run. I honestly feel that if sorted, we could easily have second guessed ourselves and thrown away some great flavor. In short, we pressed the 5 tons. Also I picked up 1.25 tons of Traminette from Dave Dexter (for the Quattro) which we also pressed... In the afternoon between press runs, I scrubbed lugs. I couldn't use the new Karcher pressure washer because the brand new replacement unit from Lowe's came with a broken on/off switch. It was along day.

Thursday: Today was the last day of our Chardonnay harvest. We took off almost 7 tons to be divide between CP and another winery. Bob Hughes came out again, thankfully. I'd have been crushed by myself. The crew was so fast today. They were done by noon. Bob was picking up all the lugs. He worked his butt off. We had the luxury of dumping the lugs into bins (big plastic boxes, 4'x4') right in the vineyard row. The purchasing winery guys then brought over a trailer that my feeble tractor's front loader struggled to place the bins on. It occurred to me after filling about 6 bins that if my front loader broke that day, I'd be screwed. 800# boxes of pure grape mass with no where to go. Its true of a lot of the equipment. If the fork lift goes down, I can't press or crush grapes. If the wine pump breaks, I really can't do anything. Well, this time nothing broke and we sent the grapes off happily.

That afternoon I lost my wallet. I needed to rent a U-haul trailer to take some wine to a festival in Leesburg on Friday. I couldn't do it because I didn't have my wallet. I had to get the wine there Friday morning because in the afternoon and evening, I need to press some more chardonnay. I felt like the simplest thing was keeping me from getting anything done. It is frustrating and depressing. It wasn't catastrophic like an exploding forklift, but it was as effective. I lost about three hours of productive time before finding the clever wallet hiding behind our hamper. I did find some long lost sunglasses, though.