Rain Dance

There's no better way to see an entire industry scramble than to mention a threat of rain while most of the valley's vines are still bearing fruit. Consult the National Weather Service, and we're getting a solid 5-8". Consult weather.com and we've just but a 40% chance of showers. I walked a block with a winemaker who purchases grapes from the Paradigm estate earlier today, and her exasperation seems appropriate to mention here. "I like to imagine all those meteorologists sitting around throwing darts at a board. 'Gonna rain? Sure. How much...well, just hit a number and we'll tell them that.' They have no idea how insane it makes our lives!"

So scramble we will. Our Merlot is ready to harvest, and was a pick that, pre-storm warning, we'd earmarked for a Tuesday arrival. The rain will apparently besiege the valley Monday evening. Alright then, we say, we'll harvest Monday morning and be happy. But the other two producers who take our Merlot, and the one who takes some of our Cabernet, want their grapes now. Tomorrow. Yesterday. So early today we sit down with our vineyard manager, query him with the robustness and staying power of the picking crew he's assembled, and wonder how we can make this happen. Done, he says.

Within an hour, the winery was a cluttered mess of picking bins, frenzied winemakers, and energized pickers, all awash in the melodic timber of excited Spanish. The luxury of a methodical harvest has left us. What we're faced with is the art of intelligent compromise - what needs to come in, what could come in, and in what we have the confidence of allowing to ride out the storm.

A big rain is a legitimate concern - moisture on the fruit can exacerbate mold concerns, canopies that have already begun their gradual decline might not bounce back, and, above all else, the rain makes working outside just a trifle more challenging. Dusty dirt quickly becomes sticky mud, and your feet will never, ever forget the chill of a cold, wet October morning.

Our Merlot buyers will get their fruit this weekend. For both producers, this means processing in one weekend what they would normally process in one week (since we are, without a doubt, not the only grower they are harvesting this weekend). Crews will work overtime, double-time, whatever time is needed to carry the grapes from picking bin through to tank. This is the beauty of what we do. Harvest flirts with routine, it alludes to control, but at its essence we are all at the mercy of the sun, the clouds, the wind. I have yet to meet anyone truly dedicated to this industry who would have it any other way. We are an agricultural society, and as such we are all loyal disciples of the church of Mother Nature.

The upside here is that the wines we've made so far, and the fruit that we're picking this weekend, are stellar. Consolation prizes, perhaps, for the frenetic dance we've been forced into to prepare for the week's precipitation. The grapes left out hanging have strong canopies, and should tolerate the rain well. Forecasts for the days following the storm are clear, and truthfully, a little rain does nothing more than wash the dust off those late-ripening varieties.

When everything is picked, when tanks are dry and barrels are topped and buttoned up for a cozy winter's nap, this week's drama will be an interesting talking point in the grand story of the 2009 vintage. But for the moment, the adrenaline of knowing where we need to be and what it will take to get us there is enough to remind us that we are all but pawns in a much larger game.

Molly Lippitt
Paradigm Winery

The first grapes are in...now what?

Harvest 2009 officially kicked off for Paradigm Winery last Thursday, with just over two tons of Cabernet and a shy ton of Cab Franc taking the lead in the 2009 vintage. Though just a small percentage of what we’ll harvest this year, it’s enough to get us back into the familiar pattern of early mornings, rounds of punch downs and pumpovers, perennially sticky hands and soggy feet, and grape shrapnel turning up in every odd place.

The Zinfandel will be our next project, hopefully ready to harvest by the start of next week. Zinfandel can be infuriating – uneven ripening will have some berries puckering into raisins while others in the same cluster still taste tart and bland. We watch the canopy and sigh with forced patience as we wait for the slowpokes, worrying over dehydration and willing the vine to get its act together. It always does, eventually.

The mornings are growing progressively colder, there are more oak leaves in the driveway than there were last week, and the valley glows in that special way made possible only by slanted autumnal sunlight. The other morning I arrived at work just in time to watch the sunrise. The pale sky above me was dotted with hot air balloons at staggered altitudes, some close enough to see small faces peering over the edge of the baskets. Though I sometimes wonder if what I do for a living is the best or the worst way to enjoy my favorite season, at that moment the answer was unquestionably clear.

Molly Lippitt, Paradigm Winery

We're Not Even Sampling Yet

While the grape trucks rumbling up and down Highway 29 signal the start of harvest for other wineries in the valley, our picking bins, sorting table, crusher/destemmer and press are all still tucked snuggly away in the storage room. As picking crews and cellar teams busy away at neighboring wineries, life at Paradigm rolls along at late summer’s languid pace. The vineyard will laze under a few more weeks of sunshine before harvest’s toils come knocking on our door.

Ripening, in the long version, is a complex physiological process that involves sugar transportation, ion transfer, respiratory catabolism of acids, and a bunch of other things that are definitely better explained in your high school biology textbook than they will be here. Ripening, in the short version, is the simple progression from tasting acidic, tannic and watery, to tasting concentrated, balanced, and well…ripe.

The Paradigm estate vineyard started veraison, the green-to-red color change shown by maturing red grapes, in late July. If we take a moment to glimpse into the evolutionary past of our good friend the grape vine, this visual cue evolved as means of flagging down a means of seed (thus gene) dispersal. Sending the maximum number of genes into the world is the end goal for nearly all life forms. But back to grapes – once the seeds are viable (able to pass the vine’s genes along in the form of a new plant), the seed chemically signals the grape’s skin that it’s time to turn color. Passing birds stop to nibble on the pretty red berries (suddenly quite visible against the green canopy), and never know they’ve fallen into the vine’s reproductive trap as they happily drop little grape genes all along the way to their next stop.

Shockingly, humans have pickier palates than do birds. While seed viability may have been completed with veraison, a tasty grape that will translate into a tasty wine is still a long ways off. Grapes starting veraison are tart, watery, and bitter. If you care to taste a berry at this point, one might find that Merlot tastes like broccoli stems and Cab is reminiscent of a non-spicy jalapeno, both with enamel-stripping acid levels and tannins that grate on your tongue in a way that you might not have a reference for unless you’ve ever gnawed on a banana peel.

As the grapes ripen, acids will slowly decrease as the sugar content increases, skin tannins grow softer and less bitter, and the overall flavors will phase out of the “green” category (broccoli, bell peppers, grass) and become more fruit-like (melon, peach, blackberries…). As we get closer to harvest, we’ll pull samples out of the different vineyard blocks in order to track chemical markers of maturity in our lab, but for now it really only requires heading out into the vineyard and tasting a couple berries to know that, for us, harvest is still a few weeks away.