San Francisco Blog

By Ella Lawrence

Harvest is now officially officially over. I know I've been saying this for a few weeks, but now there is absolutely nothing left for me to do in the cellar. It's been a gradual weaning-off, from the 9-hour days that left me covered in sweat and grape juice and shaking muscles to the 5-hour days that involved a lot of time spent selecting the perfect CD to play as I topped barrels (Billy Bragg & Wilco's Mermaid Avenue). Also weaning myself from the necessary 3,000 calorie days that kept me scrubbing and lifting in September to a regular food plan that doesn't involve meat, pastries, and wine several times a day.

Most of last week was spent planning our harvest party. Mick gave Sebastien the go-ahead to throw a party in the cellar, something that Seb has been wanting to do for a long time. So when we got the green light, Sebastien and Katie and I put our heads together. Sebastien went absolutely wild with the decorations: he spent one entire day power-washing the cellar, then the next day we spent getting it ready for the party. Table-tops over upended empty barrels made the bars (yes, there were three! one filled with Unti wine and another with an amazing selection from Mick's international cellar, plus a huge galvanized tub on another barrel that held all the whites and champagnes), and Sebastien strung lights around the foudres (the enormous barrels used to age Grenache) and the rest of the cellar. I spent the day putting together flowers from the gardens and set up for the caterers' arrival (the wonderful California Table).

By Ella Lawrence

It's been incredibly sunny the last few weeks, with the only telltale signs of fall being the smoky smells in the air as land-owners gleefully take advantage of the now-allowed "burn days," sending their piles of yard waste, vineyard trimmings and other floral detritus up to the heavens in pyres. Actually, the colors say autumn as well, too. The trees and vines have gone from fat, green and full of fruit to somewhat spindly and gorgeously flaming shades of reds and oranges. And suddenly, a few days ago, the downtown plaza and surrounding streets have been scuttling with leaves. They kick up and whirl in spirals for a few moments each hour, but the weather is warm.

A few weeks ago, I was taking full advantage of another 80-degree afternoon. Sebastien had brought out all of the barrels from the cellar and lined them up on the crush pad, and I spent over an hour moving from barrel to barrel and stirring the lees with a curved metal stick. The lees is the sediment that collects in the wine, made of particulates and yeast bodies. While the wine is still fermenting (the 2008s have just started to go through their secondary fermentation), this lees must be mixed up every few days to ensure that it ferments evenly.

By Ella Lawrence

Now that harvest is winding down, we've got a lot more spare time on our hands. There is no more treading for me to do, I've shoveled my last big tank, and we've long since put away the crusher-destemmer. It seems like everything I do in the cellar is somehow the last of its kind, and the dwindling amount of work corresponds nicely with the dwindling summer.

Daylight Savings Time has come to an end, so every evening we see the sun set over the Dry Creek Valley, a sight I never get tired of. Just after the sun goes down, the hills that divide the Dry Creek from the Russian River valleys are starkly outlined against the pale blue, about-to-be pitch-dark sky. Pine trees make the rolling hills jaggedly black, and one or two bright stars always come out first.

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 and his ukelele!

By Ella Lawrence

Today we crushed our last lot of grapes and it was a little bittersweet. Sebastien wiped a fake tear from his eye and sniffed, “It all happens so fast!” over our celebratory lunch at Bistro Ralph’s. It seems as though we did everything to prolong the last crush today,
dragging out our start time by looking at each other’s Flickr photos from Buenos Aires, eating muffins, and playing the ukelele.

When we finally began at 11 a.m. (usually we start to crush before 10), everything that could go wrong, did. We had the usual electrical-outlet problems, requiring a lot of plug-jiggling and jerry-rigging, but we also decided to forgo using the pump because the amount that we were crushing was so small. After the 1.5 tons of whole-cluster
Mourvedre (whole-cluster means it doesn’t go through the crusher-destemmer, but comes straight from the hopper into a tank, where I’m standing and jumping up and down with all the force I can muster to crush the grapes by hand...er, foot), we had another two tons of Montepulciano.

By Ella Lawrence

Can it really be possible that harvest is nearly over? That now that I’ve finally gotten good at shoveling and only lose control of the hoses half the time, we’re only going to be getting grapes for another week or two?

Maybe some people at other wineries are looking forward to the end of harvest (probably in big-production cellars where they punch down or pump over eight times a day, sleep on cots next to the tanks and only do one task per rat, like fill barrels over and over again), but the thought of being done with cellar work at Unti fills me with sadness.

Working more than full-time has kept me out of trouble (for the most part) since I’ve been back home in Healdsburg, and doing hours on end of heavy manual labor daily has provided me with much more time to think that I would have ever expected. With my body completely occupied doing a difficult task that requires a lot of physical concentration, my mind is somehow completely calm.

By Ella Lawrence

Some of my favorite things about working at Unti:

DRY ICE
Before the grapes start to ferment, there is a danger that they will oxidize while soaking in their own juice and skins and so we add dry ice, which creates a cap of heavy gas over the top of the juice, keeping the oxygen at bay. After punching down, I hack at a big block of dry ice pellets that is delivered in an insulated container the size of a hot tub and sprinkle it over the grapes. It's like the Halloween punch bowl times 100 as the ice makes the top of the juice bubble and white gas foams over the side of the tank before we tuck the baby wine in and put it to bed, which is what it feels like as we bungee the plastic sheets over the top of the square bins.

BRINGING MY FRIENDS TO WORK
My San Francisco friends are all captivated by the fact that I actually go barefoot into a tank of grapes and stomp them down, and they want to come to the winery and do it too. Since my circle of friends is mainly comprised of extremely beautiful women in their 20s, it makes my co-workers happy when they come and put on my tiny shorts and stomp grapes themselves. Sebastien's lovely wife Jessica suggested we make a pinup calendar of all my friends who come to stomp grapes in the red shorts, and is giving me pointers on proper zexy poses. I think we'll put her on the calendar's cover.

By Ella Lawrence

After a month of winemaking, I suddenly have enough energy to do other things besides tumble into bed after throwing my sweaty, grape skin-smeared clothes into the washing machine and preparing a slapshod dinner that usually involves chips, salsa and beer.

This is giving me more time for learning more about what’s going on at the winery: when not expending every last ounce of energy (and then some) on heavy lifting and deep cleaning, I’ve got brain cells left over for doing stuff like plotting graphs that track the fermentation of the grapes from beginning to end.

(Also Read: Dispatches detailing Ella's first and second weeks at Unti.)
By Ella Lawrence

I’ve discovered why more women don’t work in cellars. It’s HARD. I’m no weakling--six feet tall and 160 lbs--and I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish shoveling the three tons of grape skins into the press after we drained the now-fermented Sangiovese on Wednesday. I can’t imagine how someone smaller than me (as most women are) would be able to do the things we’re doing all day long--I barely can! Sebastien humored me by taking pictures during the shoveling and then mused, “I think we’ll have to make sure that Tony (Unti) is here when we press the big tank (10 tons of Syrah).”

(Read about Ella's first week at Unti here.)
By Ella Lawrence

Since fermentation has started, I have doubled my food intake, gained 8 pounds, and taken in 2 notches on my belt. The refrain in my head continues, even after I finish my 10-hour days, “Pump over, punch down. Pump over, punch down.” Let me explain:

All of the fruit that was picked last week has begun to ferment, so instead of giant tanks filled with just grape juice and skins, we have giant tanks filled with frothing, bubbling, CO2-erupting, yeasty-smelling wine-in-progress. And with all of the action going on in the tanks, the wine needs to get mixed around twice a day. Easier said than done when what you’re dealing with is six tanks, each at least twice as tall as a person.

To punch down, I balance a two-by-four across the top of the tank, climb a ladder with a person-sized (and -weight) stainless steel paddle over my shoulder, dig the paddle into the three-foot thick cap of grape skins, shove down with my foot on one of the paddle’s arms as I try not to fall off my other foot into the tank where an ugly death would surely await me, and repeat. Six tanks. Twice a day. I’m like the Hot Dog on a Stick girl on steroids.