By the end of the day I'm having a hard time remembering everything I did today and keeping it separate, especially with the midday nap that people take around here. I didn't sleep very well last night, I kept waking up. Yesterday we discovered there was an air leak in the press, so today we had to do our best with a less-than-perfect press, and finally we had to stop half way though emptying one cuve and wait for the repair guy, who arrived at 5:30, and is just leaving now at 7:00, apparently he patched it up, and we'll see how it works tomorrow. Looking at the repair job, it looks like the kind of repair job that could have been tackled with duct tape. We've got 4 cuves left to be pressed; the sans soufre cuvee, the carignane, and 2 cuves of vin de table. It's a complicated ballet moving the wine around in a winery this size. It's not like they've just got a whole row of empty containers lined up for after the wine is pressed. Fred has a whole map drawn out in dry erase marker on the side of one of the fermenters of where everything is coming from and where it's going. The fermenters are labeled numerically, and by volume. For example, there are 5 210 hectolitre containers labeled 1-210 through 5-210. Not all of them go in proper order either, for example there are only 10 158HL containers currently in use, but they're numbers 8-158 through 17-158. So, for example, 2-210 and 3-210 both contained grenache. All the free-run juice from 2-210 that would fit went into 7-158. The rest went into another temporary holding tank. The must was pressed, the first press went into the holding tank with the free run, the second press went into another holding tank just for press juice. The cuve was cleaned, then the free run and first press from 3-210 went into 2-210, then the second press from 3-210 went into the same holding tank with the press from 2-210, and finally the free run that had started in 2-210 and was now waiting in 7-158 was pumped back into 2-210, so now we have one large cuve of just grenache juice, and the press juice waiting in a holding tank. This process takes about 3 days. From the time sitting in 7-158, some of the lees settled to the bottom of the Grenache, so that had to be scraped out of the container so that the rosé could be racked off of it's lees, and the 3 less-than-full fermenters of varietally segregated rose could be mixed together into 2, now residing in 6-158 and 7-158. This whole process involved cleaning lees out of several containers, which is essentially like scraping two inches of mustard out of a shipping container.
After work Eve proposed we all go to town for pizza, and I love me some pizza. We stopped at hers and Yves' apartment on the way, the two of them have a massive flat-screen tv, and Yves loves Midnight Club on xbox360, which I'd never played before. Not that I needed another reason to really, really want a giant tv and an xbox360, but now I have yet another.
Upon arriving at the pizzeria and ordering a beer, I remembered that I love beer. I mean, I love wine too, but there's an expression I've heard from more than one American winemaker, "Its takes a lot of beer to make good wine." And that's an attitude that doesn't seem prevalent in this area at least, where everybody seems to be content drinking rosé for every meal. Not that I'm complaining about the rosé by any means.
After dinner it occurred to me that I really should not eat pizza. I absolutely adore it, but as a result I always eat too much, and large amounts of dairy products don't get along that well with my digestion anyway. However, after further examination I found that I had just a small fraction of the reaction that I would typically expect from that kind of cheese binge, and I began to think that perhaps this whole pasteurization mess that all of our American cheeses have to go through is perhaps a pile of horsehockey.
Ok, that's it for now. Until tomorrow, eager readers!
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