I’ve toured several vineyards in my travels—in France, Italy,
and California—but I’ve never participated in the winemaking process before. At
least not until last week when I volunteered as a grape harvester at Lincoln Peak Vineyard, an award-winning winery owned and operated by the Granstrom
family and located just outside the town of Middlebury.
Harvesting starts at 7:30 am, and as I drive the few miles
from my house, passing mist rising from fields in the early sunlight, the first
two lines of Keats’s poem “Ode to Autumn” come to mind: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!/
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun….” During this most beautiful time of
year, I’m glad to have packed my hat and sunscreen, but the sun’s rays will be far
from oppressive today. Gone too is the humidity; at noon on a day like this,
the air will feel like silk on my skin.
The rest of the crew, six other pickers ranging from recent
college grads to a man in his 70s, arrive at the vineyard around the same time.
We’re met by Sara Granstrom, who was in high school when her parents Chris and
Michaela transformed their former strawberry farm into a vineyard back in 2001.
After graduating from college, Sara worked at a few places
in Vermont, getting “as far away as Waterbury,” before returning to work full
time at the winery with her dad.
Since I’m new to grape harvesting, Sara shows me how to go
into the vine “like a surgeon,” removing only the clump of grapes, which
sometimes are twisted around vines and leaves and supporting wires.
She demonstrates how not to snip your finger in the process
(which I accidentally do, midway through the morning, but only slightly). The
other hazard to watch out for is yellow jackets who like to feast on the ripe
fruit. More than once I surprise one whose head is deep inside a grape, but they’re
so drunk on juice that they simply fly sluggishly away.
We’re tasked with picking Frontenac Gris, which is a
gorgeous deep plum color, touched with a misty grayness.
When you peel back the skin on a grape, the fruit inside is pale
yellow. Despite the grapes’ deep outer color, they’ll be used to make a white wine,
called Sycamore.
It’s meditative work, snipping the clumps of grapes and
dropping them into stacked buckets. The other pickers, Sara included, are
scattered along the grapevine rows, and sometimes when our work converges we
strike up a conversation.
I pick for a while beside Erik, a recent college grad who
just flew in the night before to take a job in the winery. He grew up in
Minnesota, where his father works in the grape breeding program at the
University. The grape varietal we’re harvesting, Frontenac Gris, was actually
created by his father, along with several other winter hardy grapes grown at
Lincoln Peak. In recent years, these new varietals have transformed viniculture
in northern climates like Vermont, enabling winemakers to produce higher
quality wines. Lincoln Peak has some awards to prove it: in fact, they’re the only
winery in America to win three Best of Show awards at the International Cold
Climate Wine Competition.
Part of the reason for the Granstroms’ success is most
likely their sustainable farming practices. That, and the obvious love and care
that this father/daughter duo puts into their twelve-acre vineyard and winery. Although Lincoln Peak wines are available only
in Vermont, they sell out every year and at this point the Granstroms are not
looking to expand. They’re already the largest grape producer in the state,
among more than a dozen registered wineries and even more vineyards.
At around 10:30, after enough grapes have been gathered,
Sara drives a tractor through the rows and she and Erik load the buckets onto
the wagon.
Then they haul the grapes, all 2,300 pounds of them, down the
hill to the winery where Chris, head winemaker, awaits their arrival.
The three
of them soon organize into an efficient assembly line: Chris unloads
a bucket of grapes, weighs it, and records the weight in a notebook alongside
the picker’s name;
Erik grabs the bucket and dumps it into a machine that
destems and crushes the grapes.
The stems are spit out to the side and form a mound destined
for the compost pile that will eventually fertilize next year’s crop.
As the buckets are emptied, Sara rinses each one out, while
the crushed grapes make their way through a tube into the press.
Inside this vat, a giant, inflatable balloon gently presses
the fruit against an interior side that has a series of holes.
As the fruit is compressed, its juice flows through the holes and into
a container below the press. An earthy sweetness floats in the air.
From here, the juice runs through more tubing and finally
makes its way into a huge tank where it will ferment and age. Since Sycamore is a blend of 60%
Frontenac Gris and 40% Frontenac Blanc grapes, the two will eventually be
combined and then bottled before the wine is ready for consumption next May.
Harvesting is hard, physical work, especially since the season has
been condensed this year, thanks to favorable weather. It usually spans
about a month, Sara explains, but since the process has been accelerated, it
will probably only last 2½ weeks. That puts some pressure on the winemaker to
gather and press it all within a shorter time frame.
These 2,300 pounds of grapes will yield approximately 180
gallons of wine, or 900 bottles. Not bad for a morning’s work. But Sara and
Chris are far from finished. The rest of the crew is still up on the hill
picking, and down here in the winery the process will be repeated a few more
times before they all call it a day.
As for me, I head home with a bottle of last year’s Sycamore
and later that evening sit down to enjoy the fruits of my labor. The wine is deep
golden in color and has a rich, smooth mouth feel. It tastes of lush peach with
a hint of spice: a glass of “mellow fruitfulness” that captures the
morning mist and waning sun of a mid-September day in Vermont.
* This post can also be viewed on DigIn Vermont's website (Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing).
No comments:
Post a Comment