After finishing my indentured servitude under pharaoh Greg Sokol on Titcomb this summer, Claire Frazer and I loaded up into a car and started chasing Ben and Kate across the country. Two days later, we found our way to Boulder, CO. We stopped at a nice pagoda overlooking the front range, and I decided to leave a gift for any future Ledyard travelers.
We proceeded into Boulder, where we visited with Ben and Kate, Palmer, ran across Answoon, and hung out with Alex Lee. There were baked goods delivered to the house, and pretty pictures of Boulder Canyon with and without Andrew Palmer in them.
Following our time in Boulder, Claire and I booked it for California, where we had scheduled jobs as the gophers at wineries. To be honest, I had no idea what was about to happen. All I knew was that I'd be working outrageous hours.
Well, working at a winery is pretty much exactly what I expected. A typical day involves digging through grapes, dumping them into bins, sorting them, driving a forklift, dealing with 180 proof brandy, dumping a dump truck, mixing up buckets worth of chemicals, and, at the end of it, drinking delicious, free wine. Unfortunately, there's no chablis or jugs produced here. On the other hand, they do make 3-liter bottles of Cabernet. I really want to show up to a party with a magnum of our "Proprietor's Reserve." I hear that's what real badasses do. Magnum = 2-liter bottle, fyi. I didn't learn this until recently.
Did you ever wonder what a half-ton of grapes looks like? And yes, they are fucking delicious beyond all reason. I think I'm ruined for grocery store grapes now, but it's so delicious. When we're sorting them, I eat as many as possible. Somehow, no one seems to mind.
The real excitement of this job, though, comes with red grapes. The whites all came in early in the season, so for weeks on end I came home depressed that I hadn't yet stained my hands and clothing with red and purple splotches. My winery processes about two or three times as many red grapes as white. I was in for some fun. Meet Quinn, the Cabernet Sauvignon grape.
More on Quinn later, but suffice it to say that, during the last week, we received innumerable bins full of grapes just like Quinn. Well, my boss is counting the tonnage, but I really try not to think about it. I was at work from 9am-4am on Thursday (also Friday) dealing with these guys. We have to process all of them the same day so they don't rot or spoil in any way.
Like I said, I'll tell you more about Quinn at a later date, but before that, we took in about 25 tons of Zinfandel grapes. The juice in red grapes is still white, so you need time to suck the color and flavors out of the skins. All the fermentation occurs in big open-top tanks while the berries are still intact. Therefore, after sorting and destemming all the grape clusters, we dump them into a tank from above (forklift the bin 25 feet into the air, then rotate it–yes, it is awesome).
Once fermentation is done, however, you need to get all that juice out of the tank without the skins. If you leave them sitting on skins too long, they start to extract pretty gross flavors. How does one do this? Open the valve, dummy.
We also do this while the wine is still fermenting to help aerate everything. Oxygen is good for young red wines. Go figure.
Anyway, we run the juice through the screen to keep out the skins from the tank, pump it into a different tank, and what you are left with is a tank filled with a couple of tons of skins. Naturally, these skins trap a bunch of juice, so we need to get them out and press the juice out of the skins. How does one do this, you ask? Simple. Rake and shovel.
You open the door, rake out a small hole, climb a ladder, then jump into the top and use a shovel to scrape tons of grape skins out the front door. The tanks are about 7-feet tall, so jumping in is a little scary the first time. Grapes provide a nice, soft landing spot, though.
We then take those bins of skins, send them up an elevator and into the press, and use the press to extract the rest of the juice from the skins. For the number-minded, we press all grapes, red and white, up to 1.1 bar. The whole machine does it gradually, spinning itself to unmat the walls and mix up everything inside. Pretty cool. Here is my boss raking the skins out of the bin onto the elevator that goes up to the press.
Yeah, so I have a very ridiculous job. I never thought that I'd be playing fireman with a hose full of wine, but, sure enough, for every batch of red wine I find myself at the top of a ladder spraying mostly fermented grape juice through a 2" hose to aerate it. It's outrageous.
At the same time, I've been doing my best to get outside on my rare off days. There's a pretty solid contingent of elder Ledyardites in San Francisco. This past weekend I played Jeopbeerdy with James Joslin, Alex Steinberg, Emily Harding-Theobald, Andrew Flynn, Whitney MacFlynn, David Quaid, and a couple of other people. Most of my off days have been mountain biking (which, out here, is terrific), but I was also able to get out kayaking with James and Steinberg and a friend of theirs I met recently at the Chili Bar section of the American River.
Steinberg drags a boat down a rapid.
Me, creeking. I must be, since I'm in a Jefe..
Biking in Napa at Skyline Park. Pretty sweet view, if I do say so myself. Also, sweet brick wall. Also, solid gradient.
Finally, I did manage to get out climbing. The nearest place to climb is, as far as I know, near the coast, about an hour away. California doesn't bolt much, but this particular boulder right on the NorCal coast has anchors at the top to let you toprope pretty much anything you want. The climbing wasn't amazing, but this particular route was really fun and the scenery was absolutely beautiful.
All in all, I'm really enjoying being on the left coast. It's pretty stunningly beautiful, the weather is nice, and the people are relaxed and generally pretty damn nice. I leave you with one last picture of the coast and a little bit of food porn to hopefully make your mouth water with desire. Hope everyone's doing well! Shoot me an email - I want to hear what's been going on with y'all.
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