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This week’s newsletter is a snapshot of the grape harvest. We substantially increased our production volume this season, and we couldn’t have made it happen without the support of family and friends. It was truly a journey in companionship.
With the harvest over, we’re left with a new understanding of how human intention impacts our idea of terroir, and what that means for the kind of wine we make.
K
Pressing Thoughts
Crank! Crank! Crank!
The greased neck of our basket press whines as Andrew yanks it round and round. A heavy base beat rattles the cement floor: my alternative electronica blaring from an overextended speaker. Red, raw vermouth gushes from the press spout into a catch basin below. There’s a morbid, skittering splash as it stains everything it touches (skin, clothing, concrete, hair) the darkest crimson.
Next to him, a squat steel tank full of what appears to be blood-red bracken, stands open to the air. This is our vermouth in process: wine, brandy, and botanicals. No sweetening, no dilution. It looks like a horror show swamp, all shredded leaves and mangled sticks, tinged dark with a healthy dose of rosehips and sumac.
I’m crouched beneath the wine press, watching the basins to make sure they don’t overflow. I swap the basins and transfer the wine to a larger steel tank. We’re not fully automated yet. Transfers like this still happen by hand.
“It’s maximalist! Maximalist terroir!” Andrew shouts over the music.
“What?” I yell back from the floor.
“Maximalist terroir!” Andrew shouts again. I barely catch his voice through the screen of sounds around me.
Andrew gives the arm of the press a good, long pull. Wine hisses through the holes of the metal basket. A spray of red dots fans all over everything within a three-foot radius.
“Okay, muscles…take it easy,” I say.
Andrew wrenches back the press arm, and the pressure lifts. The flow of wine through the spout slows to a thin stream. He looks at me sidelong and grins. “You were just talking about how vermouth is the most handled and human wine genre. It’s the opposite of traditional table wine. Traditional wine is about minimalist terroir…terroir expressed just by one plant in one place at one time. It is minimalist art. Vermouth is about maximalism: the terroir of many plants, each in its own time, still reflecting the place as a whole! It is maximalism!”
This is what happens to Andrew when he works the press. Something in him wakes up, something brilliant and bright and full of ideas.
“I like it,” I say, after a beat. “But, it’s a hard pitch. The wine industry is obsessed with the puritanical. Traditional table wine is defined by the untouched capture of pure, pristine terroir. This isn’t that.”
Andrew tilts the press forward using his boot to prop it up on two legs. The basket shimmies precariously. Neon red juice dribbles through the press pan into the basin below. “That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what the norm is or what other people think. What we’re doing is important. There are multiple ways to understand a sense of place. Minimalism is one, ours is another.”
I lean back against the horror-show vermouth tank, blades of homegrown wormwood jutting out of its surface like stalagmites. “So, what you’re saying is that there are plenty of good winemakers stewarding minimalist terroir. It’s no less honorable for us to capture it using the medium in which we’re fluent.”
“Exactly!” Andrew lets the press fall backward onto all four feet. It screeches into position. He starts unscrewing the press head out of the basket, revealing a compacted cake of spent bitter botanicals: the concentrated remains of our vermouth.
Working together, we slough the cake off the press pan and into a plastic bucket. Andrew hoists it up with both hands and slips out the winery door, heading to the compost.
In his absence, the room feels strangely still. The music, suddenly too loud. The drip-drip of wine from the press pan, painfully obvious. The winery, which, when in action, feels so full of potential and rigor, suddenly feels like exactly what it is: a very big garage, overloaded with equipment, reaching (uninvited) above its pay grade.
My thoughts slide sideways into self-doubt. What are we doing? Is this viable? Is this what success looks like?
I shake my head to clear it. There isn’t time for thoughts like these. We aren’t like traditional wineries. Our work is different. Our path is different.
The winery door creaks open. Andrew is back, empty bucket in hand. He smiles at me, flecks of sticky vermouth botanicals plastered to his cheeks and glasses. My self-doubt evaporates like fog beneath the sun. With him here, the room snaps back together. The winery is, once again, a winery. Everything is suddenly of a piece. Our conversation resumes without a hitch.
“You should make this the next topic of the newsletter,” he says.
“Maximalist terroir?”
“Maximalist terroir.”
My hesitation is brief. “Let’s do it.”
Fingerprints
Clang!
A three-foot-diameter steel tank lid slips from my hands and lands resoundingly on the cement floor. I mutter a curse under my breath and crouch down to dust it off.
There are four of us, each sitting in our fold-out farmers’ market chairs: Andrew and I, and two of our neighbors, Ann and Adam.
Ann is about the same height as me (which means everything in the winery is just a little too high), but with an atmosphere that makes her feel about twice as tall as she is. In contrast, Adam is tall, with a presence that makes him less intimidating than he could be.
For some reason, they find it worth their time to do monotonous manual labor in exchange for occasional free veggies. I think we’re getting the better end of the deal.
Behind us is a triplet of shiny new variable capacity wine tanks. They arrived just two days before our scheduled grape harvest.
Too much happens from this hip in this winery, but somehow we always pull it off.
The tanks come pre-fab, but the lids are piecemeal: a center metal disc, an inflatable rubber gasket, a plastic hose, a hand pump, and a few hose clamps. If we want to crush the 3.1 tons of Vidal currently jammed into our walk-in tomorrow, we have to puzzle these lids together tonight.
On the floor, Andrew and Adam wrestle the gaskets around the lips of the lids. Ann knots a tow string to the tops of each lid, while I clamp the pumps to the hose and the hose to the gaskets. When inflated, the pressure of the gasket against the tank holds the lid in place, and the lid can be raised to accommodate multiple tank volumes, minimizing the risk of oxygen exposure at low volume.
We crack jokes, laugh, and finally manage to inflate one. Success! Everyone erupts into cheers.
I look around the room: Adam kneeling in to help Ann with her knots, Andrew testing the seal on a freshly-clamped gasket pump, and me, slicing open a bag of lid fittings with an old harvest knife.
I realize that this, too, is a kind of terroir, a humanized terroir. Laughter and cooperation, all written into the shape of the wine like fingerprints. It’s not a thing you can taste. It’s something you feel when you drink it.
Terroir Looks Like This
The following morning, I’m back in the winery. We’re mid-crush: the loud churn of our manual crusher/destemmer rattling the bones in my chest, the skid and thump of grape-filled lugs punctuating the air. Everything smells like fruit and leaves. The floor is slick with smashed grapes. Their hardened seeds and stems crunch under my juice-sticky boots.
There’s been a character change: today, it’s Andrew’s parents, Kathy and Ron, and a family-friend-turned-adoptive-aunt, Susanna. They’re arranged in a semi-circle around a tower of lugs, meticulously sorting compromised berries from viable ones.
In larger wineries, there are mechanized conveyor belts for this work. After destemming, the berries are shuffled down the belt in an even layer, manually sorted as they pass. It’s five times as fast as lug-sorting, but costs twenty times as much (at least). Needless to say, we have no belt.
Crush days are brutal. Once harvested, the grapes cannot be held for more than a day or so before they start to break down. The longer they sit, the more unpredictable microbial activity enters the ferment.
To complicate things further, we must finish crushing the grapes before our next round of CSA deliveries in three days. For those unfamiliar with our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) membership, we offer weekly home delivery of fresh vegetables from our farm and other local small farms nearby. It’s a pay-to-play eat-local model adapted for busy lifestyles, and the financial bedrock of our business.
Andrew and I deliver the boxes ourselves. If we don’t finish the grapes before our scheduled deliveries, they’ll degrade beyond usability. The five of us have no choice but to process 6,200 pounds of fruit before then.
The day begins in high spirits and peppered conversation. Kathy talks about a recent project with Rotary International, connecting students in need to academic scholarships. Susanna recalls her childhood in Austria and how it was so different from the American experience. Ron brings up the discord in Gaza, and the weight of the world beyond the winery sinks in for everyone.
Andrew and I listen, and smile, and work the crusher and press.
As the hours lag on, however, we grow quiet. Our feet hurt from standing on the cement floor, our backs and hips from lifting hundreds of grape lugs over and over, our arms from churning the crusher wheel around and around. The sun fades beneath the trees, and a chill snakes through the single winery window. There’s no space for levity at this hour. Only sheer determination.
I have blisters on both hands from gripping the press handle and a string of bruises on my left arm where it bangs against the crusher base. My back is in a brace. My left wrist should probably be on one, too. A spray of grape juice just landed in my eyes, and it feels an awful lot like lemon juice. A small muscle in my right foot feels like it might be pulled…but I can’t stop.
We started this together. We finish this together.
If yesterday’s terroir looked like laughter, today’s looks like ragged breath and aching limbs. This isn’t the glorified garage I saw a few days ago. There’s no creeping imposter syndrome haunting my thoughts. This is a real winery. It’s our human grit that takes everything from possibility to reality.
Eventually, at the eleventh hour of the third day, we sort, crush, and press our final lug. Our helpers leave for home to recover. Andrew and I will spend the night hours cleaning the winery and our equipment, tumbling into bed sometime around two in the morning.
The next day, we will pack and deliver boxes of vegetables to our CSA members as if nothing had happened at all.
Notes to the Universe
The Merriam-Webster definition of terroir is “The combination of factors including soil, climate, and sunlight that gives wine grapes their distinctive character.”
We propose a different kind of terroir, one of soil and sunlight, yes, but also of people, plants, and time.
Grape skins continue to breathe well after harvesting. They remain permeable to the air quality of our little walk-in, and to the ambient yeasts and microbes of our garage-winery. But perhaps, just maybe, they remain receptive to delight and desperation, to ease and resolve. Whatever energetics or aura or magic humans bring to the winery, maybe they leave a little bit of that sparkle on the grapes, too.
If that’s true of grapes, then why not the wormwood and rosehips from our garden, or the hickory bark from the nearby hills, or the wild persimmon from the farm down the road? What glimmers of our passing echo in the tissues of these plants? What non-human life has left its unseen mark before us?
Nature is inherently maximalist. From ecosystems to star systems, it is an ever-changing, always-duplicating abundance of failsafes, a scale of checks and balances that ensures its own continuity.
The terroir we bottle, one of grapes and bitter herbs, and aromatic leaves, of the seen human and the unseen nonhuman, is a small homage to the multiplicity around us. Just a small note of thanks left by two little primates on a tiny rock, racing around a giant ball of plasma in the vast darkness of the abyss.
…and that brings us to the end of this note, the one I’ve written for you.
Until next time,
Kelly & Andrew
Post Script
If the idea of bottling notes of gratitude to the inclusive terroir of the universe appeals to you, I’d suggest taking a peek at our Wine Club. It’s a twice-yearly drop of our most seasonal aperitifs.
Each release comes with production information for the bottles included, as well as recipe cards created by yours truly. Our autumn collection launches in early November.
Check it out.
K
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