It's a Grind

Harvesting the Cornerstone Cellars Oakville Station Merlot during harvest 2012.

It's a grind. Another half ton bin of grapes is loaded onto the dumper on the sorting line. Another truck arrives and another twenty bins are added to the twenty or so already there. At our top speed it takes an hour to process four tons or eight bins. We rarely hit top speed. Best guess is another five hours to get through these bins. That's on top of the five hours already in.

Its like that every day. It's a grind. It's harvest. The term "romantic" does not enter your mind: at least until it's all over. The only times when the romance of it all fills your spirit are the first day, the last day and the rest of the year. The first day it’s all about the potential, the last day you are a bit awestruck by what you have accomplished. In between it's a blur as you grind through each day. It is very simply the next bin, the next fermenter and the next day.

In the picturesque harvest in the wine magazines it's all about bountiful lunches with happy workers eating hardy meals and quaffing wine from carafes. In a real world working winery its cold cuts, colds, cold wet clothes and hot, sweaty rubber boots. Most of all you are sticky. Head to toe splashed with super-sweet grape juice, which makes you a yellow jacket's dream lunch.

Then there is all that gleaming stainless steel equipment that looks so efficient and high tech. The reality is more like a Rube Goldberg invention as the whole process is a patchwork of things that don't play well with others. Something always seems to break at just the wrong moment, which makes winemakers the champions of jerry-rigging as equipment is forced to behave with beatings and duct tape. For a winemaker knowing how to convince everything to work in the winery is just as important as knowing when to pick. Let's just say that OSHA would not approve of many of these solutions.

The day comes to an end with the best beer (or two) you ever tasted in your life quickly followed by an all to short, but very sound sleep. Then you wake up and do it again, and again, and again until one day the last bin arrives.

Then, as the last bunch of grapes from the last bin drops into the last fermenter the romance hits you again. Instantly harvest is once again the best and most exciting thing that happens to you every year. It is the concentrated essence of everything you believe in and the fuel that fires your flame for the next vintage. It reminds you how lucky you are to be working as hard as you can to accomplish something you love.

We finished the last bin at about 5 p.m. last night. Winemaker Jeff Keene and I shook very sticky and very tired hands. Harvest 2012 was done at Cornerstone Cellars. 

What a grind. I can't wait until next year.

Craig Camp

Talcott Vineyard Cabernet Franc (St. Helena) Night Harvest

Cornerstone Cellars

Never Boring

Their shrill barking woke me from whatever dream I was having. A pack of coyotes was having a debate in the vineyard outside my window. In my sleepy stupor I tried, but could not remember the day of the week. It sounded like dozens of them, but it was probably just a few being particularly rambunctious. Suddenly the report of a rifle echoed sharply across the valley and the coyotes were silent. Just a few hundred yards from our house, in the other direction, the first crew of cooks were arriving for work at The French Laundry.

Such is life in Yountville during harvest. There is this incredible mixture of nature and urban sophistication, which only intertwines so completely in the Napa Valley. The reason I could not remember the day was simple: during harvest all days are the same. There are no regular patterns, hours or life. It's exhausting, stressful and the best thing that happens to you every year.

So what does this vintage mean to us? It means another debate with Mother Nature, much like the coyotes outside my window had last night. As winemakers we all bark at the weather, but in reality we live within it and in the end treasure what we have been given each and every year. Like a parent we don't have a favorite child, but revel in their differences and the memories of their unique strong and weak points. The critics will give this harvest a rating, but numbers have no soul and harvests, like all things in nature, do.

So what should you expect from a wine or from a vintage? I think you should expect personality. Those who rank vintages by number in the modern era miss the fundamental character of wine and truly do not understand wine itself. The question should never be what is the greatest vintage of this wine can I have with my dinner tonight, but should be what vintage will taste the best with my dinner tonight. The disaster vintages of days past are no more due to the dramatic advances in enology and viticulture over the last decades. On top of it we live in the Napa Valley where, let's face it, the weather is never really that bad. The ranges of vintages today runs more from producing earlier or later maturing wines and from bigger or more elegant styles. It's a fact of the matter in the Napa Valley an overly hot vintage has a more negative impact on wine quality than ones that are overly cool.

It often strikes me that critics want all vintages to be the same. I cannot think of anything more boring: or unnatural. Tomorrow morning at 4 a.m. we start picking our Talcott Vineyard Cabernet Franc in St. Helena. It will make a wine different from last year and from the one it will make the next. I would not have it any other way.

Craig Camp - Cornerstone Cellars

Night Harvest: 4 a.m. Boyd Vineyard Syrah in Oak Knoll

We like night picks at Cornerstone as the best way to bring the fruit into the winery as cold as possible. This helps preserve the fresh fruit flavors and aromatics. As the reds first get a cold soak and the whites and rosé are fermented at very cold temperatures the cold fruit gives us a head start getting the must to the desired temperature. As usual with this vintage, the quantity of the fruit we got from this vineyard was low, but the quality was exceptional. We may not make much wine this year, but what we make will be wonderful.

Craig Camp, Cornerstone Cellars

Cornerstone Cellars - Harvest 2011 Day 1

Cornerstone Cellars winemaker Jeff Keene on the first day of our 20th Anniversary Harvest, Talcott Sauvignon Blanc in St. Helena.

CornerstoneCellars.com

It's Time

It's 4 a.m. It’s time.

You wait all year and know it’s coming, but it always feels like it sneaks up on you. How can it be harvest already? What happened to summer? However, harvest time it is and at Cornerstone we are starting Crush 2011 right now at 4 a.m in the cold and dark of this September the 13th morning. That realization wakes you up and you start to notice a few leaves on the ground, the shorter and shorter days and a different type of coolness in the evening air. Fall is indeed arriving.

This is a very special harvest for us at Cornerstone Cellars as it is our twentieth anniversary vintage. We've come a long way in twenty years. These decade marks make you take stock of yourselves. As we look back there is one thing we know for sure; we're making the best wines we've ever made.

It’s been an unusual growing season, at least that’s the conventional wisdom. In fact, it’s a lot like last vintage, which means its been cool by recent Napa Valley standards. Is this the new “normal”? In my opinion a little cooler is not a bad thing. Cooler vintages give more balanced wines that are more transparent; wines that clearly show where they came from. Fruit bombs are not our goal.

The major problem so far with vintage 2011 in Napa is the cool, rainy weather in early June during flowering and set, which dramatically reduced the size of this year’s crop. Our Howell Mountain vineyards escaped this fate as the later flowering up on the mountain meant they missed the early June storms. Oddly our cabernet franc vineyards in St. Helena, Oakville and Carneros ended up with good fruit sets too as they also bloomed late.

So we head into mid-September around two weeks behind normal. That’s really not too bad: as long as the fall rains hold off long enough for everything to ripen. This, of course, is a very big “if”.

I often think there is an over-reaction to these slightly cooler years in Napa. Anyone who has spent time in some of the world’s most famous wine growing regions knows that Napa does not face the weather dangers those growers deal with on a regular basis. We will ripen our grapes. I truly believe that these “cooler” vintages make better wines in the Napa Valley. However, certain critics who define wine quality by girth disagree with me, preferring wines from hot vintages.

These cooler vintages excite me because of the opportunity they give us to make truly balanced, elegant wines designed to taste their best at the dinner table. The weather report forecasts mid-seventies and dry for the next week; perfect fall grape ripening weather. Just like last vintage I know we’re going to make wines that I love. I can’t wait.

It's 4 a.m. It’s time.

Cornerstone Cellars

Craig Camp

Waiting for "Just So"

It's a waiting game. We're waiting for "just so." Simple ripeness is not enough. Everything has to be just right - sugars, acids and phenolics all have to be "just so." It's a tough balance to achieve and in many vintages, like Godot, it never arrives. Because nature rarely offers perfection harvest is usually a battle of nerves—ours vs. Mother Natures and Mother Nature always wins. For small production wines like Cornerstone it's all about precision harvesting. We focus all of our attention on small blocks of vineyards and strive to harvest at the moment of perfection when everything is "just so." This year it seems that Godot himself has actually arrived as each of our vineyards has been coming in at the perfect point. Picking at perfection is only attained by being in the vineyards and knowing your vines. Pictured above, Cornerstone's winemaker Jeff Keene (left) and consulting winemaker Peter Franus walk our Hardman Road Block in southern Napa near Silverado Country Club. We've picked half of our Cabernet Sauvignon now, but this block, a cooler site, is perhaps a week or more away. Indeed things are looking very, very good in Napa.

Craig Camp

CornerstoneCellars.com

The People Who Pick

I was dreaming in Spanish, at least I was dreaming I was dreaming in Spanish. As I slowly woke and came back into reality it occured to me I could not be dreaming in Spanish for obvious reasons. Then the lyrical strains of the harmonious Spanish language again floated through my bedroom window. The vineyard outside my bedroom window was alive with pickers in the pre-dawn glow and their happy chatter filled the air. How anybody can be that happy before dawn and facing hours of backbreaking work always amazes me.

That was about ten days ago and those crews were the first wave, picking grapes bound for sparkling wine. However, now those first ripples are getting ready to turn into a tsunami of harvesting as the Napa Valley gets ready for the main event: the Cabernet Sauvignon harvest. There has been scattered activity around the valley as first the grapes for sparkling wine and then some of the white varieties were harvested. We picked the grapes for our Cornerstone Sauvignon Blanc early last week, in perfect conditions. This was our first harvest of Sauvignon Blanc from the Talcott Vineyard just outside of St. Helena (not too far from Taylor's Refresher), so I was out there at first light to watch the pick. It never ceases to stun me how hard the picking crews work. None of what we do could be possible without them. Every time I watch a harvest crew in action I realize that few of us could survive a half-hour, while these crews work at breakneck speed hour after hour until the mid-day sun forces the picking to a merciful end.

Tonight our new Sauvignon Blanc is slowly bubbling away in a cold stainless steel fermemter, while the pickers themselves sleep the sleep that only exhaustion can bring as they prepare to hit the vineyards tomorrow before the morning light illuminates the seemingly endless rows of vines waiting for them. Today we scheduled the pick of our Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon for this coming Tuesday and our Oakville blocks will be right behind. It's going to be a busy two weeks for us, but it's nothing compared to the ultra-marathon our pickers have already embarked on.

Craig Camp - Cornerstone Cellars