..in which Wes wraps up harvest, gets ready to wrap up winemaking, and finishes the weekly Blog cycle and sums up 2009 in rare and interesting ways…

Year in the Vineyard, Week #30

The End of Harvest, AKA

‘Killing the God’

Welcome to the final weekly installment of ‘Year in the Vineyard’.  Thanks to all who followed this story from start to finish.  I believe each installment is still available on the winemakermag.com website, so fill in the gaps if you haven’t read the whole story.  I will also publish a monthly Blog on winemakermag.com the last week of Nov., Dec., January and February.  Then, if all goes well, I’ll fire up the weekly blogs again in March, 2010.

Thanks also go out to those at Winemaker Magazine that prompted me down this bloggy path.  It’s been a pain in the ass to have a weekly deadline at times, but it has helped discipline my writing and lead to some wonderful new relationships and contacts throughout the wine community and beyond.  

By now you’re probably wondering…what’s up with the whole ‘Killing the God’ thing?  What does that have to do with the end of harvest?  It’s actually very important, at least to me, and will provide an esoteric structure for this last weekly blog.  We’ve talked a lot about growing grapes and making wine, and I’m going to write this last week’s blog more like an epilogue or the title of a poem.  Some of you will read on and wonder what the hell I’m drinking at 9 in the morning, and some of you may understand how amazingly connected all human ritual and spirituality are.  Wine is a ritual of agriculture and it connects me to a tradition that stretches back before written history.  This is where the thread begins…

In many parts of the ancient world, from South America to Africa to Europe, it was believed that dying a natural death (old age) left behind a feeble spirit.  (Frazer, JG.  The Golden Bough. Oxford University Press. 1994 Abridgement, pp 228-554)  It was common to kill Kings, especially, in the prime of their youth, to assure that the spirit inside the people’s ruler was still hale and strong.  This archetype became ingrained indelibly in the religions of the world—human gods (or gods that were on earth in human form, which many cultures thought were their kings) were killed to prevent them from growing old and weak.  Dozens of cultures in the ancient world would keep a king/king-god only for a year, and then ritually slaughter them and anoint a fresh King with the youthful blood of their successor.  For example, the Zulus put their king to death the day he showed his first grey hair or wrinkle.  (Interesting to note that when the great Zulu King Chaka discovered the British had hair dye, he asked a missionary to procure some of this magic potion to keep his neck safe from the machete’s swift swing.)

Yeah, Wes, nice story.  Where you going with this, dude? 

This same spirit of life that ran in the youthful blood of kings, gods and men also existed in crops.  The Old World, pre-christian agricultural rites of France and Germany persisted into the very beginnings of the 20th Century—mostly in remote areas unspoiled by Christianity’s purifying influence.  In the same way that the Native Americans believed that killing a buffalo was like killing a brother, and that without doing so with respect and grief would keep the buffalo herds from returning in subsequent years, European peasants believed that the spirit of the Earth (the Hearth Goddess of the Old Religion)  existed in the crops they grew to eat.  Whatever the crop, certain important rituals had to be observed on equinoxes, especially in Winter and Spring. 

The Harvest festivals were very precise.  As harvest commenced, it was believed that the spirit of the earth (the power that made crops grow like magic and sustained human agriculture and appetites), fled each stand of grain or vineyard as it was harvested (lest it be captured and manipulated).  The whole Goddess’ essence ended up concentrated in the last stand of wheat, the last gourd, the last unpicked crop in an entire community.  That last bit of fruit or grain was harvested with a most solemn ritual—usually with a silver sickle or the like.  Of course, to a modern audience, it may seem whimsical that a God/Goddess was believed to exist in the last bit of unharvested crop—but to these people these dramatic representations of the natural processes that they were trying to facilitate were as important and powerful as any modern Church service.  Man had not discovered soil science, microbiology or plant nutrition.  We were ignorant and made due.  And some of the rituals performed were beautiful expressions of mankind’s gratitude to the natural world.

As the concentrated, fleeting spirit of the Hearth Goddess was captured in the last stroke of harvest, that tiny bit of grain (or what have you) was lovingly crafted into a human effigy and ritually slaughtered and buried in the fields to assure that the spirit of the Goddess went back to the spirit realm with all the vigor with which she arrived.  Her corpse would lie in the decay and cold of Winter, and then rise renewed to bring the Spring seeds to life.  It’s a beautiful story, and one plagiarized in the New Testament, when Jesus is killed as a young man to assure he was never seen as feeble or weak.  The emotion and meaning of Jesus’ flailing (like grain harvest),  death (cutting the fruit from the vine, as shown in Byzantine paintings of the Crucifixion) and resurrection (like the crops bursting through frosty, Spring ground) all rely on our early agrarian ritualistic beliefs…the two myths emanate from the exact same archetype.  Odd that Christianity was so hateful and murderous to those of the old nature religions, as the story of their own savior was respun from the ancient, repressed threads of their earth religion.  A good story never dies.

So, it was with a great amount of emotion and respect that I clipped the last cluster from Clos Pepe today, held it in my hand, ate one berry, buried a second, and then threw the remainder into the picking bin for AP Vin.  Ceremony needed to respected, but the fruit was already sold, and I wouldn’t offer more than a berry or two to the ghosts of agriculture past.  ( I also like to think that a grape can be ritually slaughtered and resurrected into a spirit by my personal savior, yeast…)  I will admit, though, that ritual does seem to guide my heart to a quiet place, an easier place, where life seems understandable.  It was just a single berry going into the soil, but it represented an entire year of toil and labor, a year of my life I sacrificed for the wine and the vine.  That seed will always be under the dirt, unless it germinates and grows a baby vine.  A miracle?  Maybe.

That was a really long introduction to a very simple statement:  harvest is over.  The vineyard is picked clean and Cesar is on the tractor (I can see him on the hill right now out my window) cultivating the vine rows to start drilling cover crop seed tomorrow.

It’s been a fantastic year.  The wines in barrel are balanced, rich and delicious and it seems all of our clients are happy with their fruit.  I want to end the year with a series of photos from the entire year of farming to see how far we’ve come.

For those of you who won’t be able to function properly without a weekly dose of Wes (you may want to seek medication for that affliction), I will be starting a blog over at wordpress.com where I’ll write shorter blogs on Wine, the World and Everything.  It can be found here:  http://weshagen.wordpress.com/  And of course, I’ll keep blogging on the vineyard at least once a month until we start this whole thing up again.  We’ll see how my ritual worked when I see next year’s crop!  Cheers!

Photo Essay: Birth of a Vintage: Pinot Noir Clusters 2009: (Mouse-over pic for info)

Last Day of Harvest: 10/21/09

Photos by Jeremy Ball (Photography by Jeremy)

Thanks for following the journey and we’ll see you all next month for an update!

Week #29:

Rain: The Pause That Refreshes

It rained!  And while that might not be a big deal where you live—we have seen no measurable rainfall since April—6 months ago.  That’s a long time to be dry.  Which reminds me, I should get a beer.  OK back.  But yeah, it rained!  A good inch and a half.  I figured out once that an inch of rain saves us about $5000 in electricity from not having to run the irrigation system.  And at the end of the growing season when the vines are going through a rapid period of root growth (after the crop’s been harvested), it’s a perfect time for a good, long, soaking drink for the vines.  A tiny bit of stress is good for a mature vine around harvest, but this whole notion of abusing vines to make good wine is a French myth that was proven wrong about 20 years ago.  Healthy, balanced vines farmed sustainably is the rage these days.  Maybe we helped tipped the scales, who knows?

The ground got soaked and the water likely reached root level, which may impact the 3 acres of pinot noir that are still hanging, but we’re expecting a bit of heat tomorrow which should dry us up and likely get the sugar levels back to where they were before the little storm.  Today I went into the vineyard on the tractor and cultivated down to about six inches, and then poked the dirt around a little to see how deep the soil profile was saturated.  The water’s down over a foot and a half already, and still moving.  It was deeper than I expected, and wet enough that I’ll hold off on post harvest irrigation for a week or so.

So why do some winemakers seem to freak out when it rains near harvest?  Well, I may be a little more worried if 90% of the fruit was still out there instead of the 10% that is.  Water can spread rot and give it a good nudge to grow.  If there’s a little botrytis out there, it will be rampant in about 10 days.  I don’t want to spray at this late date, so I see about a 10 day window until that fruit needs to be off the vine.  The producers know this and we’re all on the same page.  If inches and inches and inches fall, the grapes will swell and dilute flavor and sugar content.  So really the main two fears of winegrowers relative to rain are dilution and rot pressure.

As I mentioned we still have three acres of pinot noir hanging on the vines, for two producers.  They chose to ride out the storm, wait for some warm weather to get a little more flavor concentration.  And while I may not agree stylistically with their decision, they are my clients and my job is to deliver fruit that is perfect to them.  So they let it hang…?  I get to sleep until 7 am a few more mornings, and the crew has plenty to keep them busy as we tidy up from harvest.

There’s little doubt the vineyard will be picked clean before my next blog, and that we will likely finish barreling down our last wines by then as well.  It’s an exciting time of harvest, when you feel you’re coasting downhill, sleeping a little more, and there’s little that could go wrong at this point—2009 appears to be an unqualified success from both a fruit quality standard and how the wines are tasting of the press.  I normally don’t run around with press wine at events and ask people to taste week-old wine, but I did that this week because I’m very proud of all my little wine younglings.

Open House:  Clos Pepe Estate and Axis Mundi Wines had an Open House last Sunday the 11th of October at our new winery digs in Lompoc.  This was the first time we tried an Open House completely on our own…we’ve always been dependent on neighbors or the Big House on the Clos to draw some customers, but this time we were in the middle of West Side Lompoc with no other wineries within a few miles.  We set up, opened some wine and waited.  Some folks showed up early and by the 11 am start time we were four deep at the bar and the couches were filled.  I did 4 punch down demonstrations and 4 barrel tastings of the 2009’s and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.  Even the boss was surprised how much wine we sold and that more than 120 people came by to taste.  It was also gratifying to know that we had some solo cache’ and that we can have these type of winery tastings and have a crowd.  The next one will be around Valentine’s Day, so please join us!

Winery work is becoming lighter by the day.  We began at 6:30 this morning pressing the last Estate pinot noir to barrel and finished by around noon.  Why start so early?  Because it was forecast to be warm today and I wanted to open up the winery for the forklift and moving bins around.  The fog broke after we loaded and locked the press, so as the sun came out we were insulated from the warmth.  It only topped out today around 73 in Lompoc, so it wasn’t much of a threat.  But we did have the afternoon off, so I wrote the outline of this blog and then joined Jackson (the Aussie intern—sorry Bill and Miguel, no pics this week) at La Purisima Golf Course for a lovely 5 mile walk spoiled.  Jackson beat me for the first time in strokes, but I was able to take 10 of 18 skins.  So we both won.  And drank beer.  Win win win.

All that’s left in the winery is Axis Mundi Sleepy Hollow Syrah that came in this week and was crushed.  It’s sticky and purple and smells really good.  Just think what’ll happen when I throw some yeast in!  We’ll inoculate it first thing tomorrow with BM45 and BRL 97 yeasts, both of which are Italian yeasts I love for syrah.  They will be actively fermenting by the weekend and will liekly be ready to press by next weekend.  Then we will be finished with a year in the vineyard and a year in the winery.

Next week will be the last blog for the year.  I’ll take some pictures.

…in which Wes, Chanda, Jackson, Steve and the Clos Pepe crew burn the candle at both ends and get over the ‘hump’ of harvest.

Year in the Vineyard

Week #27

September 25-October 1, 2009

There comes a point in harvest where a winemaker goes on autopilot.  Mornings arrive too fast, sleep doesn’t come when you need it, the mind is whirring and clicking in strange rhythms and your life is framed by the sound of snips clipping, Mexican radio echoing, and the sound of winery equipment gently separating grapes from stems, wine from skins.  Barrels fill and are put in tidy stacks, and it seems just when the winery is perfectly clean, it becomes used again and the cleaning begins again.

I might have said it already but it merits rementioning:  winemaking really only consists of two tasks.  One is cleaning.  Before we start, we sterilize everything with ozone—the press, the implements, the hoses, the hopper, everything.  Then we make it sticky and stained with wine.  This is the second part of winermaking—moving liquid from one vessel to another:  grapes to press pan, press pan to barrel, barrel to another barrel, tank to another tank, tank to bottle.  Then, after moviong liquid, we do dishes again.  Lots of dishes and lots of cleaning.  Skins and stems go into bins and are brought back to the ranch and spread in our compost pile.  Then we clean the bins. 

Of course most winemakers aren’t growers, and I consider the vineyard management my main job and the winemaking secondary.  To be honest, making wine is not that complicated.  Get good fruit and make sure your production is crafty and clean and the wines make themselves.  Growing perfect pinot noir is the real challenge, and then the focus in the winery is to allow that perfect fruit to express itself.  I’m not saying we don’t manipulate the process—all of winegrowing and winemaking is purely human manipulation.  Planting a grapevine is a manipulation.  The grapevine’s natural habitat is the forests of the Transcaucuses.  So the first Paleolithic men who planted vineyards in a village were vine manipulators.  Now we choose dozens of cultural practices in the vineyard and dozens of production techniques in the winery.  There are those that call their production ‘hands-off’ because it is rustic and non-sanitary (sorry, Brettanomyeces is NOT terroir), and there are those that call it ‘low-impact’ because they honestly try to allow a wine to represent the vintage and the vineyard.  All well and good in my book, but if as a winemaker or grower you believe that you are not manipulating the process, you need to go back to Armenia, gather some unripe fruit from the boughs of the trees in Fall (good luck fighting the birds), crush it in a stone basin, ferment the juice in a dry gourd and see how good the wine is.  Manipulation, a dirty word for some, to me means we have the science of a post-Pasteur wine business to help us, and a bevy of stainless steel implements to help us make wine that is clean, delicious, and properly uses technology to improve the final product.  Remember, winemaking, by its nature, is manipulative.

So what the hell have we been doing over the past week?  We’ve been night picking Chardonnay and Pinot Noir for Siduri, Roessler, Brewer-Clifton, Diatom, Prodigal, Ed Kurtzman, Ken Brown and the Clos Pepe Estate wines. We’ve been pressing off fermenter after fermenter of pinot noir at the Estate winery.  We’ve been racking Chardonnay—taking ½ full barrels that were barrel fermenting and combining them to make happy, full barrels of wine.  We’ve been doing punch downs on pinot noir, both the bins that are fermenting and those that are cold soaking.  Cold pinot noir must (must is a combo of skins and juice from red grapes) stays cold and without added yeast for up to 5 days in Clos Pepe’s cellar before being inoculated with cultured yeasts.    Then the must slowly turns into wine over the next ten days.  Maybe I promised you a Pinot Noir recipe this week.  Again, I have no problem giving the ‘recipe’ for my pinot noir, as there is no special ingredient or secret.  The idea here is that this recipe is attuned to Clos Pepe fruit and a philosophy that wines should be restrained, elegant, cellar-worthy and balanced.  I make wine for my own palate, as was suggested 15 years ago in a convo with Jim Clendened of Au Bon Climat.  Hey, it works for me, and (I hope) my customers.

Pinot Noir, the Clos Pepe way:

Ingredients:

3000 lb. fresh Pinot Noir grapes, cold from a night pick.  Chemistry varies, but target numbers (picks are dependent on flavor as well), are about 23.8-24.5 Brix, 3.25-3.4 pH with nut-brown skins, rich, deep flavor and a dark color bleeding out from the skins.

Few scoops of food-grade dry ice to ensure the fruit ends up around 50 degrees F or cooler in the fermenter.

One ton-and-a-half fermenter.

40 grams Potassium Metabilsulfite (S02) to stabilize the must and stun/kill feral microbes and yeast)

250g dry yeast, rehyrdrated in 40 degree Celsius water with a bit of yeast food and grape juice/must.  For pinot noir, I favor RC212 yeast, but also have used Assmanhausen, Barolo 97, Wadenswil, and even native yeast.

4 French Oak Barrels

250 grams Fermaid yeast food to help feed the yeast and to keep them from cannibalizing one another and producing off-aromas.

A splash of malolactic bacteria top start ML fermentation while the must is warm from fermentation kinetics.  This is a slightly controversial practice, as many winemakers wait to add ML bacteria until after the wine is barreled.  ML bacteria eats the malic (green apple-like) acid and creates lactic acid, which makes a wine more seamless, elegant and complex.

Punch down tool and the Plank of Pain.  The Plank of Pain is a 6” wide, 12’ long board that wqe lay over the fermenters, stand on, and use a punch down tool to mix the juice and skins in fermenting red wine three times a day.  Skins float as they are filled with C)2 from the ferment, and we want the skins in contact with the juice, so we punch/mix them.  It’s really good exercise.  The Plank has a nice strip of grip tape down the middle, and we sometimes add a phrase like:  ‘Pain is weakness leaving the body’.

Recipe: 

Sterilize fermenter and crusher/destemmer/hopper, and carefully use the bin dumper/forklift to dump the cold, freshly-picked Pinot Noir into the destemmer.  Stems pop out one side and the berries and juice fall safely into the fermenting vessel.  Add dry ice as necessary to keep the fruit/juice temperature in the high 40’s, and add sulfite to about 35 ppm.  Once the fermenter is full, pallet jack it to the area in the winery used for ferments/punch downs.  Lay a cotton sheet over the fermenter.  Punch down the bin twice a day during cold soak.  Once the bin starts warming up into the 60’s, add the yeast nutrient (Fermaid), mix well, and then take the active yeast and pour it slowly into a corner of the bin.  Allow the yeast to form a colony over the next 12 hours with no mixing or punchdowns.  When the corner of the bin swells with active ferment, punch the bin down, mixing the yeast and starting the ferment in earnest.

Punch down 3x a day, more vigorously if the ferment doesn’t smell perfectly clean, and after around 10 days the must will have turned miraculously to wine, and the whole sloppy mix goes into a wine press where the wine is extracted gently, and  the dry skins are taken home for compost.  Alternatively, you can add water and sugar back to must, referment the mix and then distill grappa/eau du vie.

Pump the wine from the press pan into French oak barrels, keep the barrels topped for 11 months, taste regularly, keep free so2 around 20 ppm during ML ferment and about 35 ppm afterwards, bottle before the next harvest.  Drink vigorously over the next 10 years.

We lost two interns last week, and we’re still a bit sad.  Liam and Matt both went home, to the UK and to Brooklyn respectively, and we miss their humor, camaraderie, and their bartending.  We miss you guys, come back soon.

That’s about all I have time for this week.  Sorry about the lack of purty pictures.  I may try to add some in the next few days.

Keep drinking pinot and I’ll see you all next week!

..In which Wes, Chanda, Steve and the crew experience the wonder of night picking, some pinot noir is pressed into barrel, the fruit’s looking beautiful, and we’re all getting a little giddy…

Year in the Vineyard, Week #26

September 18-24, 2009

With Wes Hagen, Vineyard Manager/Winemaker Clos Pepe Vineyards

Good Thing That I Love My Job!

Six picks in seven days.  

Most winemakers are responsible for their cellars, and most of harvest is spent waiting for fruit to arrive, crushing, pressing, barrel work, organizing, etc.  I have the added joy and deep responsibility of being both a grower and a winemaker, so my days are split between two professions that are normally not joined at the hip in the United States.  I’m a bit of a doppelganger during harvest.  I wake up early (sometimes it would be considered late the night before), help run the crew through a pick, snip as many clusters as I can while I’m not making phone calls or driving the forklift,  and then head off to the winery for morning punch downs, or to crush some tons of fruit, or to press some tons of fermented must.  It can make for easy days of 9-10 hours, or crazy days in excess of 17 hours.  Beer is involved, though, so it’s not all that bad.

Take today for example.  Alarm goes off at 3:17.  Coffee and a quick look at email and I’m off into the field to start picking by headlamp with the crew.  Four tons of pinot noir later I grab a few interns, leave the crew to finish the last bins, and we’re off to the Clos Pepe Estate production facility to press off 3 tons of fermented (dry) pinot noir wine into barrel.  The interns have paved the way to make today a bit easier.  The barrels have been swelled, cleaned and ozonated and all we have to do is turn them upright, align them perfectly on the barrel racks, check the interiors with a flashlight to guarantee they are free from defects, give them a few good, deep whiffs to assure they are sound for winemaking, and then we prepare the press by ozonating (sterilizing), aligning, testing power and the cycles, and doing the morning punch downs.  By the time we started pulling wine out of the fermenters it’s almost 9:30 am—almost six hours into our workday and the fog has yet to burn off outside.

Then the wine starts filling barrels and the mood lightens.  A glass appears (from nowhere or the Irish intern, Liam?) and we taste the 2009 nectar.  I say that the heady aroma reminds me of bing cherries with a hint of medium rare venison.  The interns really search for the venison—they smell more fruit and spice, but let me be my freaky self.  We open a big bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale and celebrate the first press—it’s almost 10 am.

The new visiting intern this week is Matt Six from Brooklyn, New York.  He’s here for 9 days and his presence has been a wonder—like a relief pitcher emerging from the dugout in the 8^th inning.  He’s been taking up a bit of (my) slack with punchdowns in the morning, giving me the extra time to smell and taste barrels of Chardonnay all morning (I know, it’s tough work…), do tests, make additions, crunch numbers, fill out forms and paperwork.  Matt’s been kicking some ass and he’s moved into the field and cellar with an undeniable passion, skill and alacrity.

Winemaking is pretty simple, if not laborious and exhausting.  We start by doing a few hours of dishes—cleaning and sterilizing everything (bins, fermenters, barrels, stainless, hoses, tanks, what have you…) with either the ozone machine, or by using TSP water, then clean water, then citric acid water, then clean water again.  Then we move some liquid from one container to another.  Sometimes yeast is added.  Sometimes grapes go through a machine.  Then we do dishes for another few hours until the entire winery is clean, wet and sparkling.  Then we are spoiled by Cathy Pepe’s cooking and hospitality during 4:30 pm suppers, then we try to get a few hours of rack time before getting up at 2:00 or 3:00 am the next morning to do it all again.  It’s gloriously challenging, and reminds me a bit of Lord of the Rings.  You never know how pastoral your life is until you’ve had to march to Mount Doom and be attacked by a mutated, magic-addicted midget who bites your finger off.  OK, maybe not, but harvest is a good test of your will, patience and strength.

This week I’m going to share my recipe for Chardonnay, and next week for Pinot Noir.  The reason I’m doing this is to prove that the cellar practices have little to do with the quality of our wines.  We try to allow the wines to represent the vintage and the vineyard—and even if you followed this recipe exactly, you would never be able to make a Clos Pepe wine unless you first secured some Clos Pepe fruit.

Recipe:  Clos Pepe Estate Chardonnay (in the Chablis style)

Ingredients:

3000 lb (1.5 tons) Dijon 76 or Wente Clone Chardonnay from Clos Pepe Vineyards, cold and morning picked.

6 stainless steel 55 gallon drums or neutral (4 years+) clean French Oak barrels (55 gallons).

42 grams of potassium metabi-sulfite

250 grams Fermaid yeast food.

250 grams CY3079 yeast, swelled in 45 degree Celcius water for 30 minutes.

A few grams of Ml bacteria ‘Beta’, swelled in water or apple juice.

Sterilize a stainless bladder press (we use an ATI ‘Soft Press’), and carefully load the stainless cylinder with the 3000 lb. of Chardonnay fruit.  Start the press cycle and watch the beautiful Chardonnay juice come pouring into the press pan.  Move 40 gallons of cold juice to clean, ozonated barrels.  Each barrel only gets 40 gallons so it has room to foam and bubble during barrel fermentation.  Add 7 grams potassium metabi-sulfite (sulfur dioxide) to each 40 gallon barrel of cold chardonnay juice.  Stir well with barrel stirring wand.  Repeat the process until the end of the press cycle until all 6 barrels are filled equally with 35-40 gallons.  Mix 45 grams of fermaid yeast food into about a liter of distilled water, stir until consistent and cloudy.  Add and stir into each barrel.  Then split the 3 liters of yeast in warm water into six equal portions and SLOWLY dribble the warm yeast mixture into the barrel of juice.  The idea here is to allow the yeast to form a warm colony at the center-top of the barrel.  Do NOT stir the yeast in—let it float and start reveling in its sweet, sweet new home.  Add some ML bacteria to initiate malolactic ferment while juice is still warm from primary ferment.  Go home and shower off the sticky.  Stick your nose in the barrel after 24 hours and hope for the stingy C02 smell of ferment.  If the barrel is not fermenting actively in 48 hours, take a few gallons from a rapidly fermenting barrel and add it to the slow poke.  After the juice is dry wine, rack the clean wine off the gross sediment into neutral French or stainless casks, filling each barrel completely full.  Top up ullage every two weeks and test sugar, ML and so2 at least every few months.  After 11 months of barrel age and completion of malolactic fermentation, wine is prefiltered, then sterile filtered, and bottled.

Two more things I want to share this week before I go man down for tomorrow’s pick and crush.

First, Liam the Irishman will be headed back to the UK on Saturday and I want to pay him a few compliments.  His positive attitude and smile could not be quelled, even on the hottest day in the field or the coldest night at the winery.  He reminded us to stay happy, and drinking.  He guaranteed beer would be in the house, as when there was less than a 12 pack, he made sure we went to the market.  He taught us to listen carefully for every word, so we would know what the fuck he was saying.  Simply, we would have been scrambling to keep up without him, and we’ve been comfortably exhausted with his excellent help.  Thanks Liam!  You are ALWAYS welcome at Clos Pepe, and we’ll never be quite the same without you close by.

Second, I want to pay tribute to our very own Vigneron, Steve Pepe.  Clos Pepe is Steve’s dream, and I’ve been happily squatting within it for 14 years.  He’s put his entire ‘retirement’ into making this vineyard great—when he chose this piece of dirt in 1994 it was not a mistake that it would become (arguably) one of California’s ‘Grand Cru’ pinot noir vineyards.  He applied the same care and diligence to finding this ‘terroir’ that he did in his law career, where he was one of the Top 50 Employment Lawyers in the US for decades.  He’s been more than fair and more than supportive of my management of the property, and thankfully we agree on a winemaking style that stresses elegance and balance over ripeness, concentration and score-whoring.  You may also know that Steve is Clos Pepe’s #1 grape picker.  He’s the only member of the family and/or crew that’s made every day of harvest since 1998.  A conservative estimate of the fruit Steve’s harvested with his own hands would be over 175 tons in those dozen vintages.  Whether by guts, Celebrex or both, he’s in the field picking without complaint at night, in the morning, even in the heat of the day if need be.  No other vineyard in California has a boss like Steve: a guy who could comfortably sit back and sip limoncello while watching the tons roll in, and be justified in doing so after such a demanding career.  He leads by example and is also intimately involved in the cellar work, racking, blending, bottling, and of course ‘product testing’.  Let’s all raise a glass in tribute to the man who knows how to live the wine lifestyle from all perspectives: from field labor to a host at an elegant dinner party.  Oh and thanks for the THREE bottles of 1986 Lafite you busted out for the crew and interns last week.  Guess that would be the Wine of the Week.  I didn’t take notes.  It was very good.

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

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.