Crunch Time!

This is the point during harvest when it’s usually best to cut off all communication with the outside world. Nothing is more disheartening than picking up your phone to hear a friend inquire about your Friday night plans. It’s a seemingly innocuous question I realize, but it is guaranteed to provoke this chain of thoughts:

"Friday? It can’t be Friday already. I thought it was Wednesday. Well that’s awesome! Oh, wait, I have to work all weekend too."

The joke around the cellar during this time of year is that it is always Tuesday. We worked yesterday and we work tomorrow.

Luckily for us, even though we are firmly entrenched in the routine of rising, going to work, and collapsing into bed, we get to live vicariously through the grapes, which are on the thrill-ride of a lifetime. Allow me to paint a picture of their first days in the winery:

The grapes typically arrive in picking bins loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck, although with several of our Estate vineyards only a mile or so away they are sometimes hauled up the hill behind a tractor. When a particular block has been evaluated, the decisions of how to process it are made. Type of grape, size of berry, taste of juice, presence of plant matter all determine the speed at which we run the fruit down the sorting line into the de-stemmer. Lots will be sorted and de-stemmed before being delivered to a fermenter.

For the majority of our Pinot Noir, we add precise amounts of dry ice and Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) to prevent the beginning of fermentation for up to seven days. This is called a cold-soak, and it allows for the juice to absorb more phenolics from the skins. Some of our fermenters are equipped with Glycol jackets that give us the ability to cool and heat the tank at the press of a button, while some of our smaller open-topped fermenters require us to shuffle them between a chilled room and a heated one to manage the temperature of the must. After the cold-soak period, we gently restore warmth to the juice and skins and inoculate with a hand-picked yeast strain. Different yeasts promote distinct flavors in the wines they ferment; at Domaine Serene we use many small fermentation lots, up to 120 for Pinot Noir, so that we can achieve greater complexity in our wines due to the influences of multiple yeast strains and to have as many options as possible when creating the final Evenstad Reserve blend.

Yeast needs oxygen to complete the fermentation of sugar to alcohol, so our Associate Winemaker, Eleni Papadakis, walks the tightrope of introducing the necessary oxygen without over-oxidizing the fragile, young wine. During fermentation, we will punch down the cap several times daily--a process of submerging the top layer of skins in the juice which helps to maintain a homogenized temperature, introduces oxygen to the grapes, and prevents the top from developing unwanted microbial populations. Additionally, the wine can be pumped over, which entails drawing the wine out from the bottom of the tank and returning it over the top, making sure to wet the whole cap. This does not follow a set schedule, but rather is decided directly by Eleni on a tank by tank basis according to her flavor analysis.

This weekend we will finally get to see our first Chardonnay, as well as more Estate Pinot Noir. We treat our Chardonnay pretty differently (obviously) from the Pinot and the Syrah, so I'm sure it will provide great material for the coming blog posts. Stay tuned. – Written by Zach Bryant, Harvest Intern. Photos by Megan Jones.