Every year a delicate dance is performed in wine country around harvest time. Growers, who pruned and groomed their vines over the winter, watched them come to life in the spring, and waited out every summer storm in hopes that no hail would fall, are now waiting for conditions to be just right to collect the fruits of their labor, known as the crush.
Crush is wine nerd language for grape harvest, although it encompasses a whole lot more than simply picking grapes. It is probably the most critical stage of making wine and involves several key steps, including harvesting, crushing, pressing, fermenting, fining, filtering, aging, and finally bottling.
First, the vintner needs to decide when the conditions are optimal for picking the grapes. The key measurement they use is something called the Brix. Named after German mathematician and engineer Adolf Brix (1798-1870), the degree of Brix tells the anxious grower the number of grams of sugar per 100 grams of juice. 24 Brix (the number the vintners are shooting for) = 24% sugar by weight.
Sugar content is a good indication of eventual alcohol content. By using the formula 24 Brix x 0.55 the winemaker knows that his product will be around 13.2% alcohol by volume, which should produce a wine that is microbiologically stable, age worthy, and appealing to most palates.
A heavy, late monsoon shower will send the farmer, a risk taker if ever there was one, back into the orchard, refractometer in hand, testing grapes to see if the berry sugar concentration has been diluted and the small army of assembled pickers sent home early.
Up until a few years ago, the local wineries hired work crews from as far away as Willcox and Douglas to work the harvest, but in recent years laborers have been sparse. Now, family members, retired part-timers, and friends pick the grapes.
Picking grapes may sound pretty straight forward but it involves more than simply cutting the clusters from the vines. When a picker fills a five-gallon bucket with grapes, it weighs between 20 and 30 pounds, and they have to be hand carried and dumped into large bins on a trailer pulled behind a tractor. The bins hold approximately 1000 pounds of grapes. A single row of vines can produce thirty or more buckets of grapes, and somebody has to carry them to the bin and dump them.
Working in the vineyards during harvest is its own interesting affair. The hunt for the correct place to snip a cluster is something done by feel and observation and it soon turns sticky because of that sugary goodness just a thin skin away. There is earth and there is dampness. There are the loudspeakers programmed with the calls of predatory birds to try to cut the losses due to feasting by non-predatory birds. Occasionally there are bees. The jokes can turn ribald.
After numerous five-gallon buckets have been filled and dumped into the half-ton containers it is time for the grapes to be introduced to the crush pad.
On a recent visit to Callaghan Vineyards, on Elgin Road, I had a chance to see the next steps in the process of turning water, and sugar, into wine.
Pulling into the parking lot on a sunny monsoon morning, the first thing that grabs my attention is auditory. The bird calls, coming from the loudspeaker in the vineyard reminds me of something humorous I heard the very first time that I set out to pick grapes in Elgin. I had commented about the mechanical bird calls to a young, but experienced, winemaker, who was also picking that day, and he said that it was an example of how much the winemaking process was modernizing in this viticultural area. He said, “Old school, they used to hire people to stand out in the fields all day to make those sounds.” A blend of it being early morning, and, maybe, feeling a bit woozy from some imbibing from the prior evening, made me think that was funny.
A short walk around to the right hand side of the tasting room reveals the crush pad. The concrete pad is approximately 40’ x 55’. It is framed and bolted with sturdy steel, painted with iron oxide pigment and open on three sides.
In addition to a destemming machine and a crusher, the pad houses pallets of bottles, waiting for the finished product, and various hoses and other essentials vital to the complex task of growing and fermenting grapes.
On the pad this day is Kent Callaghan, who has owned and operated the vineyard since 1990. With him is his helper Andrew Titche. Kent hops onto an ancient, yellow, propane-powered Datsun lift that he uses to fork a half ton of dark red grapes recently harvested in Willcox. He raises the load about six feet into the air and then hoists himself into position to unload the grapes into his Roto-vib destemming machine. Part beater, part rotating shaft, the Roto-vib works to both shake and physically remove the stems from the fruit. The cleaned grapes fall through into one bin and the stems are pushed out of the side and into another.
Kent works the stemmed clusters into the machine’s hopper with a formerly white, curved handled pitchfork. The throughput can be up to five tons per hour and he jokes that this exercise is “a replacement for a gym membership.”
The grape of the day is Aglianico, often considered, along with Nebbiolo, and Sangiovese, as one of Italy’s “big red” pillars. The name may be a Neopolitanization of Hellenico, meaning Greek, from when the vines were brought to southern Italy by Greek settlers around 600-500 BCE.
The stems have no further role to play in wine production. Andrew says that they are a “crop-thinning food source for the local javelinas, who go from vineyard to vineyard snacking” on the compost. I ask Kent about the modest amount of stem material that falls through with whole grapes and he replies that “stems add to the complexity.” Fragments contain tannins and woody, brown stems can contribute spice and herbal notes or aromatics.
After about 15 minutes the first batch of grapes have been destemmed and Kent climbs down into the seat of the Datsun, fires it up and pulls away. He drops the empty bin and grabs another one full of fresh harvest. He positions the new bin and proceeds to again feed the hopper of the gently humming machine. Occasionally, Kent hands the pitchfork down to Andrew so that stems in the discard bin can be pulled away to make room for more.
Once he has a full bin of cleaned grapes Kent forks it, pulls it out from underneath and backs away before sprinkling in some white tartaric acid and bringing it to covered storage.
The actual crushing will not take place today. The grapes will be put on pause for a week or two and then pressed and put into “poly buckets” for fermenting.
Fermenting is the process of adding yeast to the juice. Yeast is a living organism that eats the sugar, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide. The higher the sugar content, the higher the alcohol level. Sunlight, through photosynthesis, produces grape sugar. The more sunlight during the growing season, the more sugar in the grape and the higher the alcohol content of the wine after it is fermented. Sunny climates like Arizona and southern California typically produce wines with higher alcohol levels.
After fermentation, the grapes are gently pressed to extract their juice. For most white and sparkling wines, the skins are separated from the juice early to avoid adding unwanted pigment. Red wines, however, need skin contact to develop a deep color, rich flavors, tannins, complexity, and a textured body The amount of time the juice is in contact with the skins is called maceration in the U.S.
I ask Kent the one burning question I’ve been dying to ask, the one about going totally old school and seeing if he ever lets people foot stomp the grapes and he replies that generally he “requires a note from their podiatrist.”
More grapes are processed and the morning’s work is finished. Kent and Andrew pull out some hoses and begin washing the equipment. Soon enough the yeast will have their say and those sugary juices will convert into a nice red.