Cellar Rat: Week Eight at Unti Vineyards

By Ella Lawrence

I haven’t talked about one of the most important things in a cellar yet: the way things smell. Making wine is so sensual. Without all the touching, smelling, and tasting of the fermenting grapes we would never know what is happening as they journey toward becoming a finished wine.

Now that harvest is over, we are focused solely on taking care of the numerous bins that are filling up the cellar floor. Twice a day I haul myself from tank to tank to tank, starting with the ones that are not yet fermenting. The six tanks are packed in so tightly together that I swing my legs from one to the other like a monkey. The first tank is the hardest to get into--at 8am the last thing I want to do is strip down to some tiny shorts and sink my legs up to the upper thigh in a freezing cold vat of scratchy, itchy, sticky grape juice.

Sebastien knows how much I hate it and so he sometimes plays me the ukulele while I’m treading which makes it much more bearable. Jumping up and down in the first tank until my knees are numb (the surf booties are the only thing that keep me from total misery), the smell of fruit fills my nose. Light strawberry for Grenache and dark juicy berries for Montepulciano.

As the tanks start to ferment, the juice inside gets warmer and the stems get softer. The smell of fermenting alcohol hits you in the face as soon as the tank is uncovered, and sometimes the CO2 that is being produced by the fermenting grapes sucks the air right out of your lungs.

My friend Dan, the cellarmaster at Pellegrini, waxed eloquent about the way the smells in the cellar change during the course of fermentation.

“When it switches from the fresh, dairy ice cream smell to the to port-like skins and herbs--eucalyptus, menthol, and those smells that come through toward the end--it almost signals the end of something. It’s like going through puberty, from knees and elbows to depth and complexity.”

“It’s like you’re going from being fresh and young to getting old. And interesting!”

Those are the good smells. Now that all the fruit’s been picked, the vineyards are getting fertilized and the entire outdoors smells like cow poop. All. day. long. Luckily most of the work we’re doing is now inside, in the cellar, so the crush pad can languish in its own stink while we punch down indoors.

One morning as I broke the cap on a wooden tank of Mourvedre, a smell of rotten eggs erupted.

“Sometimes when the yeast gets stressed,” Sebastien said, “they produce a little sulfur. It’s the same stuff that gets put in the propane so if it leaks, we can smell it.” (Refueling the propane in the forklifts the day before had produced several hours of this maliferous odor).

He mixed up a batch of yeast food (dead yeast hulls and warm water) and poured it in the tank around my legs. The baking-bread smell rose up around me and the rotten eggs dissipated as I treaded the grapes, up and down, up and down.