St. Helena is a small agricultural town of 5,000 people in Napa Valley, California where wine is the one and the only thing that matters. Each year, nearly everyone in the St. Helena participates in what is called harvest. Harvest is the pinnacle of importance throughout the year in which the picking and fermentation of grapes occur. The weather conditions alone can define the quality of the entire vintage. In the Napa Valley, harvest usually occurs in Sept and Oct when the grapes reach an intended ripeness and sugar level (the measure of sugar in wine is called the brix). White wines like Sauvignon blanc and chardonnay are usually picked first and red wines like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot are usually picked last as they each require a different amount of time on the vine to ripen.
This is a hectic time for everyone at the winery and requires an incredible amount of synchronicity, long hours and often physically laborious work from every person involved. Additionally, everyone is at the mercy of mother nature. You cannot control when the grapes will hit a certain ripeness and they must be picked at the optimal time. Even if you only have a big enough crew to pick a fraction of your overall vines, you have to work through the night to bring them all in.
I was able to experience it all firsthand as a harvest intern for Frog’s Leap Winery, located in a small town right next to St. Helena called Rutherford. But what was already supposed to be a crazy and challenging experience turned into something nobody could have anticipated…
Day 1: On October 9th, 2017, I was told to arrive at the winery’s crush pad promptly at 7AM. That morning, I was surprised to wake up without any electricity nor mobile phone service. So I hoped for the best and showed up without knowing what the situation would be. I pulled up into the driveway to find the crew looking out into the nearby mountains ablaze and billowing with smoke.
Without electricity nor any way to communicate we only found out later via the radio in our cars that an entire community in the city of nearby Santa Rosa had been completely burned to the ground. Sometime around 9:30am, with roughly 30% of the grapes still on the vine, the three head honchos (John Williams-owner/winemaker; Frank Leeds-VP Vineyard Ops; and Pablo Polanco-Cellar Master) made the difficult decision to let the crews go home and hope that the power would be up the next morning.
On day 2, with pea soup smoke in the sky, nobody in the Napa Valley had electricity nor mobile phone service; however, the resourceful crew managed to attain an industrial generator and we were in business! We put our gas masks on and got to work.
The highly skilled vineyard picking crews went out first thing in the morning to pick from a particular vineyard block of cabernet grapes. They brought in 16 tons of grapes throughout the morning that was dropped off at the winery’s crush pad for us to start processing.
The grapes were forklifted onto the sorting table and my job, at this point, was to take out any of the leaves and unripe bunches as they moved up the conveyer belt and into the destemmer. This required swift movements and hours of undivided attention. Once the grapes were de leafed (my own term) and destemmed, whole bunches of berries were pumped directly into gigantic, steel fermentation tanks inside the cellar.
Due to the worrisome amount of smoke filling the valley, there was a growing fear that something called “smoke taint” could have a negative impact on the taste of the wine. The Australian Wine Research Institute describes this as,
“When vineyards and grapes are exposed to smoke this can result in wines with undesirable sensory characters, such as smoky, burnt, ashy or medicinal, usually described as ‘smoke tainted’. The compounds in smoke primarily responsible for the taint are the free volatile phenols that are produced when wood is burnt. These can be absorbed directly by grapes and can bind to grape sugars to give glycosides that have no smoky aroma.”
Frog’s Leap’s owner/winemaker, John Williams, developed a strategy to defend against smoke taint by dedicating separate fermentation tanks to the grapes as they were picked day-by-day. This would allow them to isolate the grapes based on their exposure to the smoke and test for the components individually (it’s important to note that the smoke was worse on some days more than others and more concentrated in certain areas of the valley). John told me that if there were signs of smoke taint they would either drain the juice or sell it as bulk wine. He was later quoted on this in the NY Times.
Once all the grapes were brought in for the day, I moved into the cellar where the second half of my harvest education commenced.
While the sugary grape juice sat in steel tanks, the winemaker took samples to analyze which type of yeast and in what volume he wanted to add to each tank. Yeast is a crucial component in fermentation as these living, microorganisms are responsible for eating up the sugar and excreting the alcohol.
Myself and the other self-proclaimed, “cellar rat” were responsible for mixing up the yeast, just like you would when baking a cake. We put warm water into a bucket and dumped the hungry yeast into the massive tank and then voila, you’ve got a sugar eating, alcohol excreting machine!
Then began the physically challenging part where we would treat the fermenting tanks with pump overs, punch downs and nitrogen gas. “Pump overs” are when you take juice from the bottom of the tank and pump it over onto the top of the grapes, which float onto the top of the tank, creating an impenetrable cap. “Punch downs” are more suitable for small fermentation tanks in which it’s physically possible to move the grapes around. The third and most innovative option is to add what looks like an injection of nitrogen gas into the bottom of the tank, which gets all the skins and juice swirling around and kills sulphites in the process.
The purpose of this step in the fermentation process is for the juice to get ample contact with the skins, which are also known as “tannins.” This adds to both the body of the wine as well as the color. If you’ve ever noticed the feeling of dryness or astringency in your mouth after sipping on a heavy red wine, you have the tannins to thank.
During a normal harvest, pump overs and/or punch downs for red wine would happen at least three times a day; however, due to the threat of smoke taint, John Williams decided to reduce this down to only one or two times per day. Therefore, any smoke tainted skins wouldn’t have as much as an effect on the juice. You have to give it to the man for thinking smart under pressure!
On days 3 and 4 the same winemaking processes were repeated; however, the fires posed an additional challenge. Many of the workers had been evacuated from their homes and were living at the winery. There was an ever-present state of anxiety, adrenaline and sadness. Many people didn’t know if their homes were still standing and if they would need to evacuate at any moment. The fires were approaching us from three different directions and our safety was determined completely by the direction and speed of the wind. Each day revealed harrowing stories of death and destruction. And for what felt like a lifetime, the fires were at 0% containment as the firefighters were simply focusing on saving lives rather than putting out the flames. As the fires blazed on, thousands of first responders and firefighters came from as far as Australia and while their presence was celebrated, the valley turned into a war zone.
Over 25 helicopters, DC10s and 747s filled the sky at all times spreading water and fire retardant over the inflamed mountainsides. The majority of vehicles on the roads were ambulances, fire trucks, combat vehicles and police cars. It’s hard to believe the danger these men and women put themselves in, in order to put out the the fires. The forestry department determined that there was a total of 8,442 fires across 1,087,639 acres (4,401.52 km2) of land. But with all the fear and frenzy, the best thing to do was to keep calm and carry on. My harvest experience was certainly unlike any other time in Napa’s winemaking history. Not only did I learn firsthand how wine is made, but I learned a newfound sense of community and pride in the Napa wine industry.
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