Harvest 2017 DeLoach Vineyards October

Harvest Moon
A Rite of Passage for a Wino

October
It's a late night at the winery, processing fruit from 7am well into the wee hours, working harvest is definitely not for the faint of heart. Zombie mode! Where you start to question life, and your fear of spiders is no longer so fearful since you can't see the little critters at this hour, or are just too tired to care any longer. At the end of the night everyone is exhausted and wants to go home, but one must sacrifice their tiredness for the integrity of the fruit, the job must get done, the team must go on! When these handcrafted wines finally make their way into the bottle 'which won't be for another year or two' it will all be worth it in the end, especially when there is a harvest moon to look at after a 15+ hour work day.

Work and wine in all its glory

An extreamly useful skill to have when working in a cellar is to know who to drive a forklift. 

As soon as the reds/Pinots are done fermenting they need to make their way to these 225l French oak barrels

Punch Downs on the French oak, open top tanks.
All the tanks that have kicked-off fermentation need to be punched down twice a day, and sometimes three if the fermentation gets too hot.
Fermentation is defined as: The chemical breakdown of a substance by bacteria, yeasts, or other microorganisms, typically involving effervescence and the giving off of heat.
-The process of fermentation involved in making of beer, wine, and liquor, in which sugars are converted to ethyl alcohol.

Punch downs are hard, and I think I either questioned life while punching down our 5-ton stainless steel tanks or I became enlightened.

Fermentation
Yeast populations grow given they have a comfortable environment to live in, and if it is comfortable, it's party time for the yeast, and the drink of choice is sugar!
Have you ever walked into a party and saw that one person knocked out before the party has even started? Well...that's the equivalent of a hot and fast fermentation; the hotter it is the faster it goes, if it goes too fast the extraction from those beautiful grape skins to get color, tannins, phenolic compounds...all the goodies!...will be lowered. If the fermentation gets too hot (95-100F) the yeast could die, so punch downs are key to dissipating heat during fermentation and keeping the juice in contact with the skins during this whole party.

After having a chat with DeLoache's winemaker Brian Maloney he explained that these oak tanks allow for a nice and steady fermentation. The temperature picks up gradually allowing time for the must to cold soak which helps with color extraction, and once the yeast start to consume sugars and convert to alcohol the alcohol is good at extracting tannin.
To me, a dangerous balancing act indeed, and not just by being on top of these tanks attached to a harness, but the finished product leads to brilliant colors and hypnotically complex aromas and flavors that just seem to linger on forever. 

I call this the catwalk

Punching down tanks is a good arm workout, but remember to put some leg work into it! You don't want to strain your back. All of us interns in the cellar always joked about not skipping leg day when doing punch downs.

Kristof punching down one of the open top oak tanks, dry ice on top of the cap to help cool the must

Pinot Gris
It really is Gris 'grey'
With its silky body and medium to medium + acidity, Pinot Gris gives alluring aromatics of citrus peel, white peach, almond, honeysuckle, ginger, and spice.

Barrel Work
Once the wine goes into tanks it must eventually come out!
Into oak barrels it goes!

Flavor Concentration
Wine goes in and water and alcohol get absorbed through the pore walls of the wood and eventually evaporate out.
What does that leave us with? Lots of flavor compounds, as well as tannins and acids which increases the aging potential of the wine.

Microoxygenation 
If something can get out of the pore wall of the oak staves, then something can get it as well! Small amounts of air enter through the wood's pores, which expose the wine to very slow, continuous oxidation; this process helps soften harsh young wines.

New Oak 
On the bottom of the picture, there is a barrel that looks perfect! 'that's because the interns haven't gotten to it yet =)'
New oak, much like a fresh batch of tea, contains soluble flavor compounds and tannins. New oak barrels give wine flavors like toast, bake shop spices, vanilla, kernel, caramel and so on...and just like seeping tea, the more you use it, the more it will gradually lose its flavor.

The leftover lees from the tank after filling the barrels

Doing some lees stirring on some Chardonnay barrels
You want creamy textures in your Chardonnay? This is how we do it, handcrafted wine at its finest. 

This is what happens when we fill all the barrels and there is still a little bit of wine left over!

Look at all this fruit! It's a long day of processing when we get this much fruit in, but the earlier, the sooner, and the cooler the fruit comes in the better!

Every year DeLoach hosts a sommelier harvest boot camp for a few days, here they are helping us sort through some yummy Pinot Noir.

Beautiful Sonoma Stage Pinot Noir
These tiny little clusters are going to make some concentrated and flavorful Pinot Noir.

The Somm harvest boot camp is getting ready to help dig out a tank.

Some white going directly into the press.

The pump-over work for the day, some pump-overs using Venturi and some using a stump screen, which introduces air into an active fermentation, the must become infused with oxygen which helps promote a healthy yeast population.
More on The Diverse Functions of Oxygen 

A view from below, some of these tanks are tall so if you want to work a harvest you better not be scared of heights. 

On DeLoach's  larger tanks this sprinkler system for a pump-over works amazingly and is also a good introduction of oxygen to an active fermentation.

The only time grapes get stomped on, or more like gently walked on.
Whole cluster fermentation where the stems are left intact with the grapes to give a peppery, green spice note. By stepping on the clusters we are helping to release the juice from the skin in order to give the yeast something to feast on.

Photos can never do it justice, but the view at sunrise and sunset is breathtaking.

Almost to the end of fermentation, the liquid is less cloudy.

This must still has a ways to go

Having some fun with the dry ice and chilling down a fermenting bin that's getting a bit warm.

What a typical morning of pump overs and punch downs look like and this is only the first page!
I think the hardest thing to do is push around the heavy pump!

The hands of Constance and I, the stains and rough hands don't go away until a few weeks after harvest.

My internship ended on the Sunday the devastating fires in Santa Rosa started.
As soon as I finished, I rushed back to my family in Sacramento to celebrate surviving another harvest cellar internship. I remember driving back and feeling my car shaking from the high winds that night, it was almost eery and very strange since I've never experienced winds like those before. As soon as I arrived home I popped some bottles of the DeLoach Estate Pinot Noir and enjoyed a little gossip with my sister.
Early the next day my grandfather woke me up to hurry and watch the news; Santa Rosa was on fire. The first day or so, being away from my home and not really understanding how dangerous the fires were, I was not worried anything would happen because I think many of us think these type of things will never happen to us. Two days went by, then four, then more...waiting, watching the news, not knowing if I had a home to go back to. A little over a week after the fires started I decided to go home since luckily my immediate neighborhood was not in a mandatory evacuation. As I got closer and closer to the Napa/Sonoma turn off smoke filled the air, then rolling hills were black and burnt. My heart sank deeper and deeper into a place even I didn't know existed, but as I approached Santa Rosa it was not all burnt to the ground as the media portrayed it to be. I finally reached home and just one block up from my neighborhood was all blocked off due to the fires! The air quality was so bad that by just being in my house for less than an hour I had extreme headaches and it was very hard to breathe; I left, went to check on the winery 'which was thankfully fine and a sanctuary compared to the rest of the city'  I decided to leave and stay in San Francisco for hope of better air quality, but the city wasn't much of a safe heaven air wise.
In this whole ordeal, I was blessed! My place still stands, I still have a job to go to and a school to attend. I cannot say the same for so many others that lost so much that is dear to them; some of our customers that still come to the winery even though they lost their home, some of my coworkers and friends.
 I thought I was strong by working harvest, but the will of these people to carry on, enjoy living and life, and to still enjoy wine inspires me to cherish life even more, and to take immense pride in these handcrafted wines I helped make, that so many of our friends and neighbors, local, and worldwide love.

Sonoma Strong!
The winery and the people that take care of it, are still here and thriving.
Ces't le vie!
Come and enjoy it with us!