Early Sunday morning a friend and I started out on the 45 minute drive to the Merrill vineyard. This 2 acre patch of vines is tucked back in a small valley just south of the Fairplay AVA in El Dorado County.  Our task on this morning: pick and crush 200 pounds of prime Sierra Foothills Zinfandel. 

The Merrill vineyard was planted 9 years ago with cuttings from select vineyards in nearby Shenandoah Valley. As the photo below shows, the vines are head-trained as opposed to trellis-trained.  This is the most common method of growing Zinfandel. What is uncommon by today’s standards is that these vines are growing on their own roots. Most vineyards are planted with vines grafted onto disease resistant rootstock (a reaction to the Phylloxera outbreak of the 1800’s).

The Merrills believe in minimal intervention so this vineyard is dry-farmed and is only treated when absolutely necessary. This results in natural fruit with more concentrated and intense flavors.

Back to the harvest…

The night before we left I had packed my SUV with clippers, buckets, 2 large plastic bins, a scale for weighing the grapes, some potassium metabisulfite (more on this later), a stash of my newly bottled 2005 Zin, and some snacks & drinking water.

Our plan was to arrive at the vineyard by 8:00 a.m. so we could pick & crush the grapes and get them back home before it warmed up. Luckily Mother Nature cooperated by arranging a nice cool morning with overcast skies throughout the day. We could take our time.

Since others had been harvesting from this vineyard for the last week, I suspected that we would probably be out picking on our own. Sure enough, only the Merrills and their dogs greeted us when we drove up to their property. Of course, there were also plenty of birds on hand who were loudly protesting our presence. You see, birds are but just one of the pests that farmers have to contend with as they nurse their grapes to optimal ripeness. Apparently we had interrupted our feathered friend’s breakfast.

It is frequently said that the single most important decision in winemaking is when to harvest. There are several factors to monitor when determining when to pick grapes. The visual cues include the color of the grapes themselves as well as the color of the seeds. The seeds should be tan to brown in color. A few samplings of these grapes showed that the seeds were mostly tan but some still had a touch of green. Not perfect but very close. 

Perhaps the most important measure of a grape’s ripeness is the amount of sugar in the juice. These grapes measured 24.1 BRIX. Depending on style of finished wine you’re shooting for, the ideal range is anywhere between 22 and 26 BRIX. The higher the BRIX, the more sugar there is in the juice. The more sugar in the juice, the higher the alcohol in the finished wine. These days, grapes are being harvested at higher and higher sugar levels, sometimes as high as 28, to achieve big and powerful wines with rich fruit-driven profiles. What you sacrifice at these sugar levels is acidity and balance in the wine. Although both sugar and acid levels can be adjusted in the juice before fermentation, this is considered shameful by many winemakers since it interferes with the natural physiology of the fruit and alters the wine’s terrior. Perhaps a subject for another post.

Once we got started, it took about 1 1/2 hours to pick 200 lbs. We took our time and I enjoyed catching up with my old friend as we chatted away as we picked, much to the chagrin of the birds squawking away. We each used a 10 gallon bucket (pictured above) to hold the grapes as we picked. Each bucket full of grapes was coming in at about 23 lbs so we had to fill about 9 buckets to reach our total. Once a bucket was full, it was weighed and dumped into one of the large plastic bins. The photo to the left shows the bins when we were all done.

With the grapes picked, we loaded the bins into my SUV and took a short break before taking them to be crushed.

As I mentioned above, I had brought along a few bottles my 2005 Zinfandel made from this same vineyard. Besides paying the Merrills for their wonderful Zinfandel fruit, I also wanted to leave them with a bottle of my wine. I have often heard that the wine industry is all about relationships so I wanted to offer a small token of my appreciation for letting me harvest from their vineyard. It was nice to get know them a little more and I hope to be able to make wine from their vineyard for years to come.

Next we were off to crush the grapes. Often this step is done onsite at the vineyard but since we didn’t have room for both the grapes and the crusher/destemmer in my SUV, we had to take the grapes to the crusher. Luckily we just had to drive 20 minutes up to the home of a fellow home winemaker in Placerville where the crusher was located.

A crusher/destemmer is a fascinating machine that performs two functions: gently crushing the grapes and removing them from their stems.

The grapes are loaded into a hopper in the top of the machine and an electric motor pulls the grapes along with an auger to two spinning cylinders with fins that run lengthwise. The grape clusters are pulled down through the cylinders by the fins where they are crushed as they pass down to the destemmer below.

The destemmer pulls the crushed clusters in the other direction with paddles where the grapes are stripped from the stems by the walls of the destemmer. The skins and juice fall through a shoot down into a collection bucket as shown below.

As you can see there are still small bits of the stems that fall through but for the most part this machine does a great job.

The stems exit from the far side of the destemmer as shown in the photo to the right.

The final result of our labors was about 22 gallons of must (juice, skins, pulp, seeds, and such).  We poured the must back into the largest plastic bin for the trip home.

However, the last crucial step was the addition of 40 ppm of S02 (potassium metabisulfite) to the must. This is necessary to kill off any wild bacteria and yeasts that may have been present in the grapes to prepare it for the primary fermentation. Some daring winemakers skip this step and chose to let the must naturally ferment using these so called “wild yeasts” but this is a risky proposition which can often result in fermentation problems and wine defects. 

With the S02 added and the crusher/destemmer cleaned, we were headed home with over 20 gallons of Zinfandel must sloshing about in the back of my SUV.