Blind Muscat’s Crush II

Making wine at home is a pale imitation of doing serious commercial winemaking. The scale is vastly smaller; the financial risk differential is enormous; plus, you never have to worry about selling the stuff, which is the hardest part. But it is an instructive microcosm, rich with lessons, setbacks, triumphs and insights.

Today—actually, yesterday—we’re in setback mode. Blind Muscat and his pal Steve (who styles himself Mini-Blind) spent most of Labor Day trekking out to the fine town of Herald, northeast of Lodi, to pick up a couple hundred pounds of Chenin Blanc. This variety, the star of the Loire, is headed for extinction in California, victim of its own success a couple decades back as an entry-level, slightly sweet, not-too-threatening wine, a legacy that makes it vinifera non grata with today’s “serious” wine drinkers.

It’s a variety I’ve always wanted to make but never found through my usual sources. So when I was sitting there in San Rafael judging the amateur wine competition at the Marin County Fair back in June, and my tablemate turned out to be a grower who had Chenin for sale to homies, I locked in immediately. Two hundred pounds, 12 gallons of juice, just what I needed. I got a call from the grower, Gerald Cresci, last week, and we set Labor Day as the harvest date. (Mr. Cresci, by the way, sells these same grapes to Six Hands Winery, the mini-boutique project of Peter Marks, wine director at Copia.)

Blind Muscat being, uh, nearly blind, recruited Mini-Blind and his vehicle for the trip. We headed out at eight in the morning from Berkeley, got there at ten, and went to work. Gerald had the grapes picked, but the three of us had to work together to do the destemming, crushing and pressing in his driveway / crush pad. It was a tiny reminder of how much manual labor and cleanup is involved in winemaking, and how little glamour. Lift that bin, slip on those skins, crank that basket press, dump that bucket, wheel that spent pomace out to the compost heap, wash your hands, wash the equipment, wash the equipment, wash the equipment . . . . pay the man.

Flush with virgin Chenin, we stopped at the Lodi IHOP for an all-cholesterol breakfast on the way back. Life was good, and harvest was in high gear. Back at subterranean cellars, I siphoned the juice into five-gallon glass carboys, chilled it down (in my refrigerator, inconveniencing many other foodstuffs), settled it overnight, racked the juice off the sludge, and hit the three separate vessels with three different yeast strains. For the next two days, it was just into the fridge, out of the fridge, trying to keep the temperature somewhere in the mid-50s Fahrenheit, alternating between the 45º in the fridge and the 65º in the basement.

Then yesterday evening, as the yeast was just beginning to do its foamy, bubbly thing, I went downstairs for another swap of inside/outside carboys. I set an empty cardboard box down on top of some other boxes that had bottles of wine in them, and the pile tipped over, and one thing led to another, . . . and by the end, a bottle of a Chardonnay sample kindly sent to me by a fine winery crashed into one of the Chenin carboys . . . spewing four gallons of sticky-sweet, 22.5º sugar grape juice and a bunch of broken glass onto my basement floor. I spent an hour mopping it up and cursing fate. My back hurt; my shoes were crusted with sugar; I’m still finding shards of glass. 

This is what happens in the real world during the crush and later on in the production of wine, only it’s 2,000 gallons not four. This is why winemakers and vineyard workers and cellar rats should be celebrated as Ag Heroes.

Blind Muscat has moved on. Now he’s worried that the remaining Chenin is going to feel pressured to make up the slack. He’s thinking of calling the wine Performance Anxiety.