Thursday, September 10, 2015

Wood and more wood - Building the Winery: Part 15

There seems to be no end to the amount of wood being put into this building. Trucks come in, each with their own tail-end forklift, to pull off and position mounds and mounds of wood. Pallets of panels, skids of pressure-treated lumber, 4" x 4"'s, 2" x 4"'s, rolls of Tyvek, and beams so big one person cannot lift even one end off the ground.

A crew comes in on a Friday, 12 or 13 in all, and before you know it a building is taking shape by the hands of a well-orchestrated crew. The average height of these workers cannot be more than 5' tall. They may be short in height, but proportionally all have the strength of gorillas. One person will "grab" seven or eight 2" x 4" x 12"'s and place on his shoulder to move it into position, all without skipping a beat. Their workplace language is American-Spanish.....for every 5 words of Spanish there is an English word thrown in that has no translation other than it meets specifications on a drawing. They work from sun up to sun down, taking only a short siesta around lunchtime. Coconut milk and water are the refreshing drinks of choice. Very few of them hold a hammer.....pneumatic air guns and Skil saws are the noise making implements on the work site.

In less than a week the walls are up and the roof is on. The roof is mostly made up of a series of pre-made trusses, designed and built off site and then within just a couple of hours put in place by a crane as workers nail in position. Where trusses weren't located, rafters, beams  & joists were built on location by these agile workers. From the start of the walls to this part of the assembly took only one week.
As you look at the picture, you will see what appears to be seven doors in the front part of the building. As I may have explained earlier, the building is being built using a classic carriage house design. The seven doors represent the seven carriage ports, however only the center one is actually a usable door. The others are faux doors because they really just provide a decorative front for the building, with actual working walls on the inside of the building. The two on the left are where the bottle room and rest rooms will be, while the 2 on the far right are on the north wall of the gift shop.
In this later view you will see the new Visitor's Center starting to take shape. It is no longer just a 2-dimensional building on a set of architectural plans. The walls have been covered with Tyvek, and the roof is waiting for the roofers to come in and staple on tar paper, followed by the roof shingles. 

When it is completed it will be over 6000 square feet, with the downstairs being open to the public (less the bottle storage room of course), while the upstairs will house Diane's office, along with a conference room,several other offices and a kitchenette. It is now time to get super serious as to how the inside will be laid out......the tasting bar, the gift shop, the display area, and the function room with its fireplace for those cooler evenings.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Other things goin' on

Certainly the building of the new Visitor's Center has taken a lot of attention lately, but there are other parts  of the farm that are moving right along as we enter the fall.

After nearly nine month's of pruning, leaf pulling, spraying, and shoot positioning, not to mention weed wacking, trellis repair, planting, and fertilizing, we are once again entering harvest season. If you thought that the day to day field work was exhausting, try picking and processing grapes. For our first harvest of the season, the picking of our Seyval Blanc grapes, we solicited the help of eighteen volunteers. Compared to last year when we had only six people cutting off the full bunches, we thought 18 was ample.
 But after an entire day of picking, beginning at 7 a.m. and going right through to 4 p.m., there were still 3+ rows to do. Five pickers returned the next day, tired bodies and hands all, to spend nearly another full day wrapping up less than an acre of white wine grapes.

And after picking into the bright yellow lugs, the grapes needed to be brought back and processed. Crushed, destemmed, and then sent through a bladder press, and ultimately moved to the stainless steel tanks where they sit for a day or two as we allow some of the solids to settle out prior to initiating fermentation.

The time and energy spent throughout the season had its rewards. We harvested 11,421 pounds of grapes which resulted in 2500 liters of liquid gold.

We still have six more varieties to pick. Though we expect great yields from our Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, and our Norton, none will match that of the Seyval Blanc. Fortunately, these will be picked throughout the balance of August and well into September, as we let the Brix levels rise in the absence of rain, but with plenty of sunlight to enrichen the flesh of the grape. Our Scuppernongs are not likely to be fully picked until sometime in October.

There are other parts of the farm too. We expect 2 new calves to be born in the third week of September, and though they will most likely be drinking their mother's milk for a half dozen months or so, we need to consider making sure they have enough raw food to get them through the winter. This year we harvested the front field of its Fall Panicum grasses, getting it cut, teddered and roll baled for feeding to begin in and around December.

Being Framed - Building the Winery: Part 14

Wow, am I behind the eight ball. This past week has been 100% harvest, and while we're picking grapes the building has absolutely taken off. This is what 12 guys (and 1 gal) can do in 3 days. A day of laying out the walls, a couple of days putting up the outside framework, and then all of a sudden the plans move from being 2-dimensional to something where one can actually picture what  the finished product would look like.
The weather down here has been great for both builders and grape growers. Sunny, with the occasional cloudy day, and nearly no rain. 

The 7 openings you see in the front are for carriage doors, since this will be a giant-sized carriage house when it is completed. The first owner of our home was Harry Spratley ("I'm just wild about Harry, and Harry's just wild about me" fame), who spent his life partying it up and raising carriage horses for the NYC carriage trade. The new building was inspired by the farm's original purpose. 

As for picking, our first harvest in 2015 was Seyval Blanc. Where on a mere .8 acres we pulled in 5 & 3/4 tons of grapes. It was our largest crew ever, with 18 people taking part in the 2-day picking event.For this white grape we needed to make multiple 11 mile trips from the vineyard to the winery because we were picking faster than we could process and we needed to recycle our yellow lugs faster. All of these grapes resulted in 2500 liters of wine juice, after they were destemmed,crushed, and pressed.

Two days later we picked our Viognier. From a poor showing of 180 pounds last year, we pulled in nearly ten times that this year, primarily due to the added attention to pruning methods and being  a recovery year after we had a bad disease problem in 2013.

It is up to the winemaker to tell us what is next, but I suspect after pulling our whites, the reds will start taking center stage for future pickings. It is a combination of Brix, acid, potential for disease, and weather that determines when we pick.   Based on our weekly readings, I think the Petit Verdot are next in line.