One of the biggest treats for me is living in Arizona’s very first American Viticultural Area (AVA). Established in 1984, the Sonoita AVA was the result of the work pioneered by Gordon Dutt, a soil scientist from the University of Arizona.
Dr. Dutt planted his first vines in the area in the 1970s when he recognized the potential in the soil—primarily alluvial and volcanic, rich in calcium and other minerals—and a mostly cooperative climate with a large diurnal temperature variation. Warm days and cool nights promote excellent conditions for ripening grapes while maintaining acidity levels.
My wife and I were first attracted to the area in the early noughts because of the abundance of horses and ranches, but I was well aware of the nascent wine industry that was underway here.
Eric Asimov, a wine and food critic, had famously declared that “Wine Is Food.” I thought that if our retirement home was in an area with active vineyards that good food and restaurants were sure to follow. Witness The French Laundry in the heart of Napa Valley, a bucket list place for me.
The years of yearning to be out here, far from the ice and snow and hustle of a working life, caused me to make a promise to myself, to wit: I want to promote and support the Arizona wine industry in ways other than just consuming it. Anyone can enjoy wine. To participate by working at it was an even higher contribution.
Of course, when you work at wine you usually get paid in wine, so there is that.
On a recent November morning I found myself in the company of Kati Spencer. She is one of the partners of the group of grape growers and winemakers that make their home at Twisted Union Wine Company on Elgin Road. I am there to help out on Bottling Day for friends Chris and Lori Johnson, owners of Sunset Ride Vineyards, who have just put the finishing touches on their Harvest Moon and Riesling offerings.
Kati explains that theirs is “a very small and manual process capable, on average, of bottling 150 cases in a single day.” The focus for Kati is in seeing that in all steps of the process that wine comes into contact with only sanitized surfaces. The wine is at rest in the stainless-steel vats in which it had been fermented.
First up is the 100-micron Plate and Frame filter. According to Kati, “it uses paper filters to remove any remaining leaves and large sediment. The wine then flows through the sterile filter which takes it down to .45 microns. This ensures that the wine will be shelf stable.”
The wine is pumped through the filter and into the gravity fed filler, which looks like nothing so much as a Turkish hookah.
The wine itself has already gone through “a kill step.” When yeast is introduced to grapes it breaks down the sugar and converts it to alcohol. Fermentation eliminates bacteria.
In order to ensure sterility, all hoses, filters and the gravity-fed filler are flushed with hydrogen peroxide and a solution of citric acid and sulfites and water. Everything gets cleaned twice, both after each use and immediately before its next use.
While the hoses are being sanitized, Chris takes a ride on a heavy duty Toyota Fork Lift and delivers a pallet and a half of empty glass bottles to the back of the bottling room. There are 16 boxes to a layer and 5 layers to a pallet. Each box contains a dozen 750 ML bottles.
Meanwhile a work crew has assembled. Janet Veta, Terri Malloy, and Claudia Butler are in from Elgin. Vern and Connie Vassey and Tom and Eileen Delaney have made the early morning drive up from Vail.
The bottling room at Twisted Union is a cavernous affair. The ceiling is 22 feet high. Two fans turn languidly to move the air. Everything is painted antiseptic white. The large overhead garage door is fully open, and the room is cool. There is still ice in the puddles beside the crush pad just outside the door but in true Arizona fashion at least one person will be working in shorts.
Everyone leans in as Chris gave a lesson on the process. Instead of getting assignments we all self-sort into the jobs that we think we might like to do.
The workflow looks like this: Tom opens up the boxes of empties, inverts them, and shimmies the bottles out, right side up, onto a waist high table.
Lori, next in line, injects a quick shot of argon, an inert gas, into every bottle. The argon rises in the bottle as it is filled with wine and forms a protective layer to prevent oxidation. Terri takes the bottles and hands them to Claudia and Connie who place them under the nozzles of the gravity feeder, which begins to fill them when the nipples are pushed up. The wine doesn’t stop flowing until the bottles are removed and the nipples are allowed to drop back down, so one has to stay on one’s toes.
Janet is in charge of deftly putting the black caps into place over the open necks as the now-full bottles move towards the capping machine.
Eileen is running the mechanical capper, a General Electric Vat 200, operated by placing two index fingers, from two hands, on two widely separated buttons to ensure that no fingers are lost in the screw top process. When the bottle is pushed into place and the machine is activated, a whirligig of a contraption clamps down on the caps and then returns to the up position when the buttons are released.
Vern is working to my left. He is taking the full and securely capped bottles and putting them in boxes marked with the wine’s name and vintage. As the reporter on the scene, I’m not doing much, just taking notes and stacking the full cases onto pallets in rows of 15.
The first six bottles to come down the line are dumped outside to ensure that there is no residual cleaning solution left.
We are up and running, ten people attending to our various chores. At 9:23am our first bottles are produced. Chris directs that these should go into boxes marked “F&F”, for Friends and Family. We work steadily and the bottles are rolling along until a glitch, of sorts, occurs and we have a couple of large cups of wine that cannot be reintroduced into the system. Under the dictum of “Waste Not, Want Not,” those who are inclined help keep the wine from being spilled, uselessly, out. All the parts here need to be kept lubricated.
Music plays from the room’s speakers. This is a mostly gray crowd, and we play a game of Name That Tune or Name the Movie That Tune Was Featured In.
Occasionally the remarks turn ribald. There is a lot of laughter.
In the half hour before noon, we complete our first pallet of finished product: five stacks of 15 cases each, 75 cases of wine. “Against All Odds” by Oasis plays gently in the background.
At lunch we are treated to pizza from Papa Murphy’s in Sierra Vista. The pie is delicious and served with a choice of the Harvest Moon that we spent the morning bottling or the Riesling that we will work with in the afternoon.
There is some nostalgia in the lunchtime conversation. Claudia recalls growing up in Tucson and the way that her mother kept the wine that was being fermented in the closet wrapped in Christmas lights to keep it at the right temperature. Someone else remarks about the cooperative nature of the Sonoita AVA: vineyards working with vineyards, sharing facilities, techniques, insights and labor in the cause of getting the wine out.
Lunchtime over, it is back to the proverbial salt mine.
The work is a little slower in the afternoon and that is to be expected, after all, the average age in this group is probably north of…50.
At last, the second vat holding the Riesling is emptied and clean up commences.
As we all head towards the exits we are offered some of the finest wine that Arizona has to offer. We nod, give thanks, and say, ‘See you in the vineyard.’ This session of A Sky Island Social Club is officially over.