In which Wes tries to keep up with the fruit, the weather and the expectations of a dozen crafty winemakers…and finally fixes a hyperlink,

Year in the Vineyard, Week 25: In Medias Res

September 11-17, 2009

With Wes Hagen, Vineyard Manager and Winemaker: Clos Pepe

We’re definitely in the midst of a busy harvest.  The early heat got it ripe, then the nice cool weather we’ve been enjoying allowed for the hangtime, and now we’re rushing to get a good deal of the Estate fruit into the winery before the forecasted heat wave arrived early next week.

This week’s installment will be short and sweet, with a few pics I managed to snap between picks, punch downs, crushing, pressing, writing, emailing, phoning, and of course trucking.

Picking:  Without any heat spells, I would be playing golf at the Valley Club in Santa Barbara today.  On my calendar there’s a big question mark which reads: “Golf at Valley Club?  (good luck).  The invite came from a great customer who’s putting on a wine dinner tomorrow night at bouchon in Santa Barbara—a wine dinner that Chanda and I will attend and slip out early to try to catch some precious, precious sleep in between picks, punch downs and crushing.

Since last week we’ve really kicked into third gear.  Each morning we start picking at 6:00am, and try to finish before 11 am so the fruit can be delivered cold to the touch.  Cold fruit makes better wine—hot fruit produces volatile acidity as well as having the propensity for spontaneous (unwanted) feral fermentations.  That’s a fancy way of saying that the yeasts in the vineyard start fermenting the wine a bit prematurely.  So the mornings have been early, exacerbated by an annoying tendency for me to wake up between 1 am and 3 am and start thinking about all the fruit, fermenters, pending heat waves, etc.  It can be a little overwhelming at times, but these are the months that we pay our dues and earn our keep as winemakers.  It’s an odd blend of gut-wrenching anxiety, giddy elation, sleep deprivation, muscle soreness and beer drinking.  All in all it’s a more-than-fair way to make a living.

Last week we did a pick for both Tyler Wines and our Estate Wines, and the LA Times Magazine sent a fabulous photog named Macduff Everton to cover the event.  I am in the process of writing and revising a 3500 word, 8 page article on Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir for LA Times Magazine, which of course is thrilling, yet exasperating in the context of crush.  Fortunately the first draft is in the can and being edited before I get a second (hopefully last) crack at it, and so far the pictures and the text seem to really be clicking.  CLICK HERE to see a great gallery of 150+ pictures of Clos Pepe and Richard Sanford that may make the cut for the Magazine.

Today was a standard day:  up at 5:00 am, updates on Facebook and Twitter (weshagen, staritahills or clospepe), check the email for fires to put out or fruit buyers with questions, check the calendar and the contracts to make sure we’re picking the right fruit, and then a quick bite/slurp of strong Kona coffee (thanks, Hula Daddy!), off into the field for picking.  After a few tons are picked and the crew’s on autopilot, I’m off to the winery for morning punch downs.  Punching down is the hand-craft way of mixing the skins and juice of fermenting pinot noir—you get on top of a plank over the fermenting bin and push a long metal ‘punch’ through the cap of floating fermenting skins (lifted by the production of CO2), and remix the juicy bits with the skins.  Each bin takes between 2-10 minutes, depending on how much attention it needs.  After morning punch I haul ass back to the pick, and work until the end of the pick.  We finished Siduri’s pinot section by 10:30 and finished our Estate section around noon…temps att he vineyard were mid-70’s—still cool enough to pick.

I trucked the fruit to our Lompoc winery, forklifted it out of the back of my truck, got it in the cool winery, and then came back again, picked until the end and then loaded up Chanda, Liam, Jackson and Chris Harshman (visiting friend/fellow Redlands alumnus) and we went to the winery to put the fruit through a crusher-destemmer and chill the ‘must’ down with a heaping helping of food-grade dry ice.  The fermenters ended up around 50 degrees, which will be perfect for a 2-3 day cold soak before we add yeast and really get the ferment going.  We finished at the winery just before 5 pm, so we had a 12 hour day today: very physical, very demanding, and this kind of work makes you hungry for protein and thirsty for beer (hic).

That’s about as much as I can manage to get out today, as ‘Mama Pepe’ is putting together dinner for the crew in the big house, and I should likely take a quick soak in the hot tub to loosen the agricultural muscles for tomorrow’s long day of picking and making Chardonnay.  Next week I’ll try to go into a little more detail about the processes and recipes I use in the production of the Clos Pepe Estate wines.  For now I’m comfortable knowing that the wines are all progressing beautifully, all the chemistry is spot on, and I’ll try to minimize my anxiety that next week may get very hot.  I’ll also got through our new plan:  mounting lights on the tractor and doing night picks to avoid the heat.