an education in wine production

Last Saturday I took a much-needed break from store-set up to help out my friends Dana and Nick. Dana is starting a winery, and they needed some extra hands to process the grapes that had come in that week for their Cabernet Sauvignon, so I headed out to the Hillsboro area for an eduction in wine-making and a few hours of work/fun.

Cab Sauv grapes

Basically, we started with lots of grapes, still on the stems. These Cab Sauv grape clusters were decently loose, so most separated nicely from the stem when they were fed through the de-stemmer (the red contraption in the photos).  My job was to stand on a bucket (cause I'm short) and dump grape clusters from the original bin (which you can see to the left in the image below) into the de-stemmer (the red thing), which would do it's thing and dump out separated grapes in to the bin that Nick and Dana are standing next to. Unfortunately, lots of little stem pieces make it through so Nick and Dana had to hand pick the pieces out as we went along... not so easy. The bin is really big, and the grapes come out fast so they have to work quickly.

Nick and Dana pulling any stray stems

The de-stemmer, and just grapes!

The de-stemmer shoots out the stems into the green bin you see below and someone (we all pitched in here) had to hand sort through those stems to pick out all the grapes that didn't come off in the machine. It's tedious, but worth the time because quite a few grapes didn't separate. Apparently these Cab Sauv grapes were way more cooperative (because they are fairly loosely clustered) than the Pinot grapes Nick and Dana processed the week before. Pinot grapes are very densely clustered, and don't come off the stems easily, so they had to be run through the machine several times. Boo on that!

Nick showing his son August the family biz.

Thanks Dana and Nick for my intro to wine making! The sticky arms and sore back were worth it, and I look forward to trying your wines next year!