Day 1: Work begins

Well, after a slightly early departure from Houston due to Hurricane Ike and the lack of electricity, David and I arrived in San Francisco Tuesday night. Our early arrival was, however, perfect timing as I discovered that I was needed for work on Thursday morning. Grapes were ready and work needed to begin.

The day began at 7am, as Andrew, (the winemaker), Tim (another assistant) and I, left San Francisco and headed out to Keefer Vineyards in the Russian River Valley, approximately 1.5 hours northwest of SF. The crew at the vineyard started picking our fruit at 3am and when we arrived around 9am, we found our 8 bins, approximately 4 tons, of grapes waiting for us. We loaded them up in the truck and headed back to the winery.


Approx 1/2 ton of Pinot grapes

After prepping all of our equipment we loaded the first bin of Pinot Noir grapes in the lift and begin the process of sorting the fruit as it fell into the destemmer. I won't go into too many details of the full process but the goal of this step was to remove any undesirable grapes from the batch. We then ran the grapes through the destemmer which removed the stems and dropped the berries into a separate bin below.


The crew for the day: Tim, Shane, me and Andrew sorting the grapes into the destemmer.

It took about 7 hours to process all 8 bins and then the clean up process began. Everything in the winery needed to be cleaned and put away in preparation for our next round. (We source from 8 vineyards...this was only the first!)


Hosing down a screen

It was a LONG day. I got home around 10:30pm, took a shower to get all the sticky grape juice off of me and headed to bed exhausted but feeling extremely fulfilled to have my first "crush" behind me.

Tomorrow we head out to check on grapes at another vineyard located near Mendicino to determine when they will be ready for picking and processing.

More to come...