Purple Stained Fingers: Wine Lesson #1
That’s what my fingers looked like last night after 10 hours at the winery . . . completely purple. But apparently that’s just how it goes this time of year. The grapes come in by the truck load and we immediately start processing them, which means first de-stemming them. Don’t worry, we don’t do this by hand; I think my fingers would actually turn into grapes if we did that. We have a huge machine called . . . guess what . . . a destemmer. The fruit goes in the top and through a large tube where little rubber paddles spin around plucking grapes from their stem. The single grapes, juice, and broken skins fall out the belly of the machine into a bin or onto a chute and into a fermenter, which is basically a HUGE plastic or aluminum bucket. Because we are dealing with the pinot noir variety, everything that comes out of the destemmer is set to ferment together so that the juice takes on the dark purple color of the skins. This is really just step one and there are MANY more to go. “Plunging” will be step two, where we’ll use a giant plunger to push the skins down to the bottom of the fermenter over and over again. Picture a toilet plunger but with a really long handle and a bunch of holes in the actual plunging mechanism . . . It wouldn’t work well for the toilet but works great for plunging grapes. Okay, that’s all you get for this week and to be honest I don’t really even know what the next step is so you’ll just have to wait to hear about it until I find out for myself. It might be something really cool I haven’t even thought of yet.
On another note, we head to Christchurch this evening to pick up Jean who is flying in tomorrow afternoon. We will start our tour of the South Island with her along the east coast toward Dunedin and then head inland to Te Anau and Milford Sound before returning to Queenstown for a few days. She has come in the heart of fall. Leaves are turning brilliant yellows, oranges, and red and the storms that have rolled in are leaving just a bit more snow in the mountains. There is definitely a briskness in the air and the days are already getting shorter, but there is something wonderful about bundling up and drinking coffee as the days get colder.