Grapes

This blog has gone to hell lately, an unhappy coincidence or related to my return to work after six months of parental leave.

My hope is to find enough waning moments of time to describe how our club began and how we ended up where we are now. The thing about writing background pieces for the blog is that I haven't had a chance to share what we're currently doing. In many ways, this is a cornerstone year for Citadel Landing Cellars, and I'm really looking forward to telling you why (and how!).

We need to talk about the harvest, or crush as it's called in the industry.

It all begins with the grapes.

I'd toured wineries, tromped through vineyards, and eaten enough thompson seedless to understand that good grapes were probably not easy to come by. I also knew that in our part of the world, land suitable for premium red vinifera grapes such as merlot and cabernet was extremely limited, lilliputian at best. The premise of quality didn't connect well either with those boxes of southern grapes, usually swarming with wasps, available late in the summer at certain retail establishments. My journey didn't have a beginning, yet.

My apprenticeship as a janitor in my father-in-law's wine cellar ended the spring after it began. In the fall of that year, I was invited to make the trek to our local wine region, some five hours drive from Vancouver. It was, after all, a family affair. My in-law had sold his farm in that area a decade earlier, but still had a mental inventory of farmers, land and the grapes they produced. He was one of the first to grow red vinifera in that area, and his knowledge of southern Okanagan valley viticulture (grape growing) was encyclopaedic.

The road from Vancouver enters the southern-most reach of the Okanagan valley near the town of Osoyoos and descends steeply from the mountainous west. Over the years, he and I stood together many times at a lookout point that clings to the edge of the valley, usually eating breakfast and drinking wine at some rudely obscure and nascent hour, and there I received detailed and sometimes emotional lessons on the local terroir. In other words (and often many words), I would hear accounts of what grew best where, who owned the land, what had failed, and who was making a go of it now. Even today, after a good meal and a few glasses of merlot, the Okanagan farming and wine stories are always near at hand. I think my father-in-law dreams the hot, dry rolling hills of the Okanagan as if they were inseparable of who he is.

On the day of our first Okanagan grape sojourn, my wife and I were invited to rendezvous at her parent's house, anytime before 6:00am. It was made pretty clear that straggling was unacceptable. We live about forty-five minutes distant, and as we drove up the street to their house, everything looked pretty much like it should for early morning October - dark, cold, wet and quiet. As we pulled up at 6:00am precisely, the whole place unexpectedly lit up into a frenetic hive of activity . Cars, trucks, and vans, previously and discretely parked along the road, came to life. Engines revved, headlights flared, and people ran back and forth shouting at each other and finally getting into their vehicles. This was no bucolic outing to a wine region -- it was time to get the grapes!

I barely had a chance to get out of the car before my mother-in-law thrust a mug of coffee into my hand and ushered me towards the family truck. Inexplicably, I was guided into the driver seat (a privilege unknown to my wife!) where we sat wondering what was going on. Moments later, my father-in-law appeared and with European pragmatism and accent explained that I should follow the convoy, which he would lead with a much larger truck. Then, with a roar, six wheels, and a cloud of diesel, he was off.

In a few short moments everyone else followed suit with near military precision, while I fumbled with the ignition, lurched forward over the curb nearly annihilating the Rosemary crop, finally got between the correct road lines, and sped madly to catch up. We were a convoy of at least a half dozen, speeding madly into the dark mountain passes, with a mission of almost religious importance.

Several hours later, as the sun finally decided to rise above the mountain ridges, we stopped at the half-way point to refuel, breakfast, and for me to basically remark with surprise that I'd made it. I remember one of the wives walking by, carrying a family bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, which was slightly odd considering the moon and stars were still out and the prevailing ethnic propensity for real, home made food. To everyone's happy surprise, the lid came off and out wafted the savoury warm smell of chicken and pork cutlets, still hot from the fryer several hours earlier. No culinary detail would ever be missed on the harvest trip.

By 9:00am, we'd all checked into a local motel and converged on the vineyard. Grapes, loaded into 500 pound totes, where stacked and awaiting, as was the local farmer who looked either happy or annoyed or both, as his numerous clients milled around tasting grapes and pontificating on the sugar level and overall quality. To my unintuited eye, the grapes looked beautiful in their uniform clusters with large purple berries that tasted incomparably sweet. I'd reflect in later days of better education that those grapes were also almost entirely free of disease, without any green clusters, and pretty damn near fully ripe. How sweet? Merlot from that vineyard averaged, over time, around twenty-five percent sugar, which is about fifty percent more than a typical table grape.

My father-in-law, temporarily falling back into his old career as a mine construction foreman, started assigning jobs to all, bringing order and sequence to an otherwise chaotic operation. The crusher was unloaded, washed, and set up; a tractor roared to life and brought forward the first tote of grapes; foul smelling doses of sulphur dioxide (an anti-microbial agent used since Roman times) were applied to the grape clusters; empty barrels were unloaded and lined up like waiting soldiers; and buckets were readied to scoop the crushed grapes, called must, from crusher tub to barrel.

And then crush began.

Pitchfork in hand, the stronger of the men began to lift grapes from the totes into the hopper of the crusher. The crusher, powered by an electric motor, separated the grapes from the stems of their clusters, and deposited the resulting split berries and their juice in the tub waiting below. A rotating crew then scooped the must from the crusher tub into the barrels, one bucket at a time. As you might imagine the result of this work is somewhat sticky in nature - think human jam tart. All that fruity sugar also makes an ideal lunch for any and all wasps that may be aggravating humans nearby. But it's great fun, and it's often easy to lose track of time as an endless stream of totes gives way to countless barrels of must. At least that's how it's supposed to play out...



But, someone's got to pick the grapes and provide the much needed labour leading up to harvest. In the Okanagan, a traditional supply of farm help comes from the eastern province of Quebec. It's a great irony in Canada that the north-eastern areas settled by the French are too cold with growing seasons too short for cultivation of the premium vinifera grapes we all associate with France. Could our meagre five-thousand acres of Bordeaux imitation be the Okanagan's draw for French-Canadian kids from Quebec? Or is it, as my friends from Ontario and Quebec say, a youthful rite of passage across the vast breadth of the country from snowy cold to rainy wet? I don't know, but that day the pickers and the farmer had a wee tiff over wages that ended in an unhappy exchange of east and west european words punctuated and concluded by au revoir.

We had about three or four tons of grapes processed, but depressingly yet another five tons still hung on the vines. Father-in-law made a snap decision, handed out pruners, and off we all went to pick - old school. I'll admit it was miserable work, in part because I'm tall and the fruit clusters never seemed to be easily within reach, and also because it was on the verge of snowing and a fine drizzle had quickly soaked through my various layers of clothing. It was not a morale building vision, either, to see my mother-in-law picking three buckets to my one. On it went for some five hours.

With the last tote crushed, and all the equipment painstakingly disassembled and cleaned, our final task was to pay the farmer. I would learn after many experiences at harvest that the payment ritual almost never deviated from what could resemble the mafia godfather collecting protection money from neighbourhood shopkeepers. After the labour of crush, under cover of a car door or outbuilding, we'd strip off sticky, wet, often muddy clothes, change into fresh attire and report for payment to the kitchen. Inside, the big purchasers would crowd around the table, and the onlookers (usually wives, kids, hangers on like me) would mill behind, often standing. Coffee or tea would be served, and then, from his seat at the head of the table, the farmer would apprise a buyer, consult a tattered piece of paper with amounts and costs, and proclaim something like "Joe, fifteen hundred pounds, seventeen hundred dollars." Joe would then dutifully (publicly?) count out the amount in fifties or hundreds and push it over to the farmer. After a nod in Joe's direction, the farmer would turn to the next buyer, and the process would repeat until all had tendered payment. It was amusing in a parker brothers' monopoly way, but one couldn't help but be impressed by the thousands or even tens-of-thousands of dollars accumulating at the head of the table. No receipts were ever rendered, and one could only assume in good faith that the tax man had not been forgotten.

When I bought my own grapes the first time, I was a proud man to have a seat at that table.

With the work of day complete, and the grape must resting in barrels safely embraced by the cold evening, a party of wine, food, and family unimaginable to my northern protestant roots ensued. In the motel, we sat shoulder to shoulder, family, friends, buyers, farmers, and anyone who loved the land and what it produced. Breaking bread together, and drinking what sun, soil, rain and man had created over earlier years, they talked (I listened) about a living history of farming and winemaking. It was a remarkable and unforgettable night, a tribal experience as old as humanity itself.

The next morning didn't begin quite as early as the first, and oddly there was no wine poured during breakfast. Evening passion had given way to a level concern for getting the grape must home before the day warmed and spoilage could begin. Loaded with fourteen-hundred pounds of grape must, balanced in the back of the truck, I turned west and started to climb out of the valley towards Vancouver. Hundreds of kilometers later, with the mountain passes fading into the east, we stopped one last time before the city to eat, drink, and recollect that it had been a good harvest.