Juice bath!

Nicholas is still out of commission with a back injury, so at present it's just Jordan and me in the cave, with Nathalie coming by regularly to give us instruction. First thing this morning we gathered tank samples for more tasting by Nathalie and Cyril to decide which tank to empty tomorrow, and where to put it. We're also still dealing with cuve 7, which is a syrah with stuck fermentation. We've got 2 small fermenters with the lees from the white cuves trying to get it working, and this afternoon we pumped a few hectoliters of the mourvedre that's just finishing fermentation into the syrah cuve to try and get it working.
Jordan and I started the debourbage of the clairette that came in Monday. That's the process of pumping the clear top juice out of the cuve, leaving behind the heavier junk at the bottom. What I didn't know was that it's very important in this process to never stop the pump, because stopping the pump lets the wine in the hose fall back into the cuve, unsettling the settled heavier bits at the bottom, and mixing them back up with the clear juice. So, Jordan was up above, and I was down below with the pump when he started shouting something to me. It's hard enough to understand what's being said to you in the cave with a noisy pump running, to say nothing of the language barrier. I stopped the pump to ask him to repeat what he'd said. Rather than repeating it, he told me not to stop the pump, so I turned it back on, and again he started trying to tell me something. Again I stopped, and again he told me to turn it back on, so finally I turned it back on, and went up the stairs to ask what he was on about. He was trying to tell me to prepare a bucket of water to clean the pump when we were done, and then he told me why you should never stop the pump during debourbage.
The result of the whole debacle was that we had much more cloudy juice than we should have, so it wouldn't fit in the small cuve we'd planned on putting it in. By this time Nathalie had come around, and had gotten the story from Jordan. I had a feeling that his version of the story put the blame fully on me, and whether I was right or wrong she was definitely irritated, and we both got a telling off.
At this point the cuve that wasn't big enough for all the heavy bits was completely full, and we were about to move it all to a bigger cuve. I was up above to pump the juice out of the too-small cuve, when Nathalie accidentally pressed the button on the pump, causing the too-small cuve to overflow, showering me with grape juice. I proceeded to pass the rest of the morning in a decidedly ill humor, now having cold sticky grape juice dripping down my back and into a number of places I prefer not to have grape juice.
Lunchtime came, we finished moving the white juice around, and I got to have a shower, which cheered me up tremendously.
The afternoon was devoted mostly to cleaning and getting the cave ready to empty the marc out of cuve 32 tomorrow, and possibly receive the cabernet. I was assigned the task of cleaning 2 drapeaux. I can't think of an English word for them, drapeau literally translates to curtains, but these are big metal things with water tubes through them that are used to cool the cuves during fermentation. The rough part about cleaning them, especially when they've come out of a red cuve, is that they're covered with tartaric acid, which is deceptively difficult to clean off. You start off with a hose, and some of the bits just flake off, making it seem like the job's going to be easy as pie, but then you learn that the bits that didn't just flake off are holding on for dear life, and you've got to use some manner of caustic cleanser that's so nasty you have to wear gloves just to handle it.
And that was the second major chemical event today. The premises were also sprayed for mosquito abatement, which is awesome. But it does speak to the issue of organic farming in winemaking. I make the point quite often to customers that there are a great number of winemakers who adhere to organic or sustainable practices, but who don't get certified because they want to keep their options open. This is a perfect example. There is no organic option for taking care of a major mosquito problem, and even though in this case the spray was only dispersed on the areas of the property where the grapes had already been harvested, this treatment would have nullified an organic certification if Carlot had one.
At this point I'm keeping one eye on cuve 19, which is being used as the receptacle for the juice from cuve 32, which is to be emptied tomorrow. It's emptied by gravity, which means cuve 32 is just sitting with an open faucet, with a hose leading down into cuve 19. The danger here is that one never knows exactly how much juice one will get, so there's the possibility that cuve 32 will overflow cuve 19. So I'm checking it regularly while I watch Heroes.