Wine | vmac+cheese

Hint, hint

Posted on October 3, 2008 by vmacandcheese

Tonight, as Joe and I walked home from a well deserved Friday night dinner at Mexico DF:

In a rare moment of public affection, he reaches his arm around my shoulder and leans in to kiss me on the cheek. He stops, then recoils for a moment, his nose squinching.

“You smell like coffee,” he says, then leaning in for another sniff, “and grapes.”

Well, I think to myself minutes later as I lather up in the shower and rinse away the day, that just about sums up harvest.

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Cellar Rat: Day “We made it through September!”

Posted on October 3, 2008 by vmacandcheese

That’s right, folks. Harvest — though it completely caught us all with our pants down, scampering for the bushes — is around half over. With hundreds of tons of grapes already processed in the first weeks of September (and most of that tonnage already turned into wine), picking has been ramping back up again and the winery is getting slammed with fruit deliveries. When I left work on Wednesday, around 10 tons (that’s 20 barrels, or 6000 bottles) of Cabernet had already been delivered. As I understood it, a few more truckloads would arrive before nights end.

If that sounds like a lot to process in a day or two, consider that the first week and a half of September — you know, when the pants were around the ankles — we received 225 tons worth of grapes. THAT’S A LOT OF GRAPE JUICE. And have I mentioned we make 900 DIFFERENT wines? And that those 225 tons were about a THIRD of the total tonnage we’ll receive?

Anyway, with harvest back in full swing again, CrushCamps are back too, and I’ve found great joy in teaching other people about winemaking. Folks show up so bright eyed and bushy tailed, truly interested in what we do and more than willing to ask lots of questions, and that’s awesome. I love hearing people say that they had a great time and learned a whole lot, and better yet, that they can’t wait to come back and get more involved with wine.

For me, too, the learning curve there has just been exponential, and as I come home and report my days to Joe, I can’t even believe how much knowledge I’ve had to stuff into my brain over the course of a month. If you ever need someone to explain cap management to you, I’m your gal. (more…)

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Welcome to the good life.

Posted on September 22, 2008 by vmacandcheese

I’ve never known my mother to drink a whole lot. A beer here, a margarita there, but as a kid, I can’t recall many instances of her consuming more than one or two beverages in a single sitting. Moreover, it was rare that she ever purchased wine, which would only appear in our refrigerator when my grandmother would come to visit — we’d stock up on white Zinfandel.

So it came as a surprise to me when, one evening when I was in the 9th grade, she had the impulse to browse the wine section at our grocery store. It was a warm fall evening, and my mother and I had been out running errands, with a stop at the market the last of them. We needed something for a quick dinner, as it was already getting late and I still had math homework to attend to.

We’d made it through the produce section and picked up a bag of grapes, when my mother made her detour. I knew nothing about wine at the time, save the syrupy white Zin I’d been drinking with my grandmother since an age that would make most parents blush. I stood to one side, patiently for a moment, without interest, then moved closer to see what she was looking at. She’d been examining the labels, and all of a sudden, turned to me with an idea. (more…)

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A weekend jaunt

Posted on September 21, 2008 by vmacandcheese

Recently, after two years of not having easy access to an automobile, Joe and I signed up for ZipCar. Not only does it make getting huge amounts of groceries a whole lot easier, but we also decided we wanted to take advantage of the many amazing places that surround San Francisco and get out of the city for more one day weekend trips.

So on Saturday, we hopped in our rented MINI Cooper and jetted up to Yountville. Pretty much instantly, I felt like smacking my head against the dashboard because Napa Valley is SO FREAKIN CLOSE. Even with traffic in Berkeley and Vallejo, we got there in about an hour. Why hadn’t we done this sooner? (more…)

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Cellar Rat: Day Five

Posted on September 17, 2008 by vmacandcheese

Nothing could be quite so precarious as climbing up stacks of barrels, each filled with a half ton of wine, for the sole purpose of measuring their Brix and temperature, until you begin to think to yourself, “Well, shit, if The Big One hits San Francisco right now, we’re totally effed.”

As in, pray you can jump from the top of the barrel mountain without spraining your ankle or breaking your leg, then running thirty or forty meters out of the room in the vain hope of making it to the exit door without other barrels or boxes or T-bins or steel fermenting vats falling on your pretty little head.

In order to find this picture, I Google image-ed “barrel stacks,” and found this photo on a UC Berkeley website detailing a study that showcased the disastrous effects an earthquake could have on the wine industry. Let’s all note the photo of the barrels post shaking, shall we?: (more…)

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