A Happy Season in the Life of a Winemaker
Written by John Faulkner
It's late summer, and we're about a month out from harvest. The grapes in the vineyard are turning color: going through veraison, is how we say it. There's fall light, morning and evening. (Mid-day, especially during this week's heatwave, doesn't yet show the declining angle of the sun.) It's a bittersweet observation that no one who lives here can help but make: yes, summer is on the wane! Blackberries are ripe. The grass is dry, and in most cases, harvested and baled for hungry winter livestock. The corn is "heading up" with flowers. And the creeks are low, and warm.
High summer is frenetic with activity. It's too much of a good thing, almost. I, a temperate man from the temperate latitudes of southern California, mention this to the locals. They seem to agree. Our social calendars have been too full.
Winter is the opposite. Winter is an introvert's season. It's hard to book a dinner date, everyone's calendar is so fully blank with the agenda of lethargy. The people are at home on their couches, thinking and brooding.
Fall is a mix of thinking and doing, and the winery is the epitome of the mix. I, a "socialized introvert," thrive. It's a happy season in the life of this winemaker. The exercise of body, mind, and spirit invigorates me. Work, play, cross-cultural sharing, conversations ranging from testy to profound... harvest is balance of the high-wire sort!
The people of harvest are almost always a diverse mix, because the harvest requires lots of hands, and invites lots of hands. They come, far-flung, from all over the world, and bring their cultural savoir faire, curiosity, and faux pas to the mix. It's fun, it's fertile! Just add wine!
The commotion and physical toil of harvest go without saying. It's hardly astute to point out that nature dictates the pace: weather, plant physiology, microbiology... It feels equally prosaic to say that we in the wine industry must fall in with the pace, synchronize ourselves to the lifestyle of a plant, to the lifestyle of a microbe. Especially for this creature of habit, the sudden change in lifestyle can make the onset of harvest be discombobulating.
My friend Curro, a Spanish winemaker friend who's equal parts farmer and philosopher and night owl musician, gave me a winemaker "koan" one day, during working vacation together in Chile (we were helping with the harvest at a friend's). Bees were swarming the cellar, everything was the worst sort of grime: vineyard dirt mixed grape juice, which is to say, sticky mud - and I guess it was hot out. There might've been Metallica playing. I'm certain there were dirty coffee mugs and juice-encrusted wine glasses all over.
"There's perfect order in the chaos!" Curro exclaimed happily. He personifies harvest: buzzing activity, and philosophy, in the same breath.