Whoever said wine is made in the vineyard forgot to mention that winemakers too, are made in the same vineyard: during harvest season. I recently got to witness and experience this first hand when I took part in the harvest and wine-making at
Graham Beck in Robertson.
Now, I am not a winemaker and after my first experience I am not saying I do not question my secret ambitions of becoming one. To say that this experience, a whole 1½ days of it, changed my life could be THE understatement of the year, if you are in to those type of things. This being my very first time in the vineyard, it dispelled all, well, most of my preconceived ideas about this phenomenon harvest is.
Moving down from Durban to Cape Town to work in the wine industry, I had this mental list of ‘to-do’ things once I get here. Whilst not top of my list, taking part in grape harvest was up there in my top three of this to-do list.
So you can imagine my delight when I was invited by not just any winemaker but by the legendary
Pieter “Bubbles” Ferreira, Cellar Master and MCC maker at Graham Beck whose wines have been chosen as the celebratory drinks at two of the world’s most loved Statesmen’s inauguration celebrations, Nelson Mandela in 1994 and recently, US President Barack Obama. The harvest invitation may have come after a few hours I spent with Pieter in a hot tub literally filled with bubbles….but that is a story for another day, it was the best invitation I have ever had. Any wine lover anywhere in the world will tell you what a prestigious honor this was, I mean it’s Pieter Ferrera, whose nickname, ‘Bubbles’ should explain it all.
So there I was, my backpack bursting in all corners with my ‘stuff’, sleeping bag in hand -a loan from my boss which I never got to use, and I was ready for my first time. Ready to get in to the shoes of a winemaker and float away in the bubble of one of the best MCCs in the world.
Thinking about it now, it really should have rung a few bells when I got to Graham Beck in Robertson later that memorable Wednesday morning, that I was in for a good one. There was no offer of welcome drinks, a glass of a cold bubble, not that I expected it you see, but it would have been nice. There was no “Sit back
Zwai, relax for a few minutes…”, perhaps while being ushered in to the TV room to kill time and certainly there was no introductions to a lovely lady with long black hair in a ‘floaty’ floral dress who, in the picture I have in my mind, will be floating in slow motion, giving me a smile that only I could read as a promise of romance, possibly a kiss later on in the vineyards? No, nothing like that. It does happen on TV I swear.
Instead, I was asked to find space for my backpack and before I could fully figure out what was happening, Pieter was ready, Graham Beck ‘Crush Team 2013′ T-shirt in hand. Now I am a smart guy and I needed to explanation as to what was going on here.
It soon dawned on me that this was no holiday spent out in the winelands. This was serious work that I would later on learn that people get up to as early as 6 O’clock in the morning only to finish in the early hours of the next morning.
With my black Graham Beck ‘Crush Team 2013’ T-shirt on and feeling rather proud of myself, it was time to get down to the business of wine-making. Pieter took me to the winery where he introduced me to Pierre De Klerk who is the wine maker at Graham Beck in Robertson and a self-confessed MCC enthusiast. As we walked around with Pieter introducing me to the rest of the team, I was overwhelmed, intimidated yet excited by the sheer size of the place. The huge, tall steel tanks lined-up from one end to the other going high two stories. The humming of the slowly rotating big pressing machines as they squeezed every bit of juice from the grapes as they were being loaded from the top. This was serious business and you can’t help it but get into the psyche of things. I could smell the freshly pressed juice or must as it is called, as it moved from the presser to the steel tanks where the magic of fermentation happens.
With the formalities out of the way, I was ready for my first task. But before I could get my hands ‘dirty’, it became clear that as much as I had the right T-shirt on, I was wearing the wrong shoes. Wine making requires a lot of walking around the winery and mostly on wet surfaces and without the right gear, you can easily find yourself flat-back and that is long before the must has fermented into wine. With the help of Benna, the foreman at the winery, I found and changed my new pair of boots. It was good-bye to ankle-length Blakes and Hello to my knee-high boots (to others it’s mid-calf high but don’t judge).
On the day, the automatic sprinkler that washes the grape bins after they have been emptied into the presser decided not to work and so hose-spraying the bins was to be my first task for the afternoon. This was easy enough, or so I thought. The grape loading area is a busy area and requires a lot of attention and alertness. The grapes arrive in a tractor-pulled trailers from the vineyard and they are weighed in on this huge metal scale where the tractor stand with its load and the data from the scale is fed to the closely monitored computer in the winery. This data is then used, amongst other things, to compare the harvest intake for the year to previous years’ ones. This is important because it determines the amount of wine to be produced from the harvest in that particular year – simple math: more grapes equals more juice, producing more wine resulting in more joy!
The hosing of the bins went on quite well for the first five or so bins, I mean, how hard can it be? You stand there with this huge hosepipe, wait for the forklift to empty the bin into the presser, squeeze the pipe and hose the bin clean. Simple. But no, this was no easy task, you are working in open air here and the Robertson sun in late January can be cruel, even on my black skin. Also for consideration was the wind blowing the water back to me and before long I was almost soaking wet. You’d say this wasn’t such a bad thing considering the heat but honestly, this was no wet T-shirt contest.
I remember making what could be recorded as my first mistake as a ‘wine make’: asking what time we were going to be finished. I asked the question with all good intent, you know? I did not ask because I was tired or anything of that nature, but just so I know what time we could reflect and maybe hold a little discussion on the day’s progress. OK, also maybe so I could update my Facebook, who wouldn’t want to do that! The answer to my question to Pieter was preceded by an exchange of smiles with Pierre, smiles that said to me ‘you shouldn’t have asked that’. This was not because it was a wrong or bad question, during the introductions to the team I remember being encouraged to ask as many questions as I can and this was one of those questions. The answer was two, three or four in the morning. I thought they were joking.
Chardonnay is chosen by a lot of people as their favorite wine variety, perhaps mine too and I was lucky that for my first day this was the wine we were making. Bins and bins of chardonnay grapes kept coming from the vineyard which are then pressed and later on blended with Pinot Noir to make the internationally acclaimed and award winning Graham Beck Chardonnay/Pinot Brut. This is the same wine that was chosen by President Obama for his election celebrations and had, 15 years earlier on, been chosen as the official sparkling wine for former President Nelson Mandela’s inauguration. I felt like royalty.
Though at this stage there was no wine and certainly no awards, just must and grapes, we were well in the process of producing one of the world’s best bubbly. It is also at this stage that I came to learn the reason why we were to work well into the early hours of the morning. For MCCs, juice-skin contact has to be minimized and to ensure that that happens, all day’s pick had to pressed the same day and not left to lay over-night. This practice ensures that the quality of the grapes is not compromised, producing high quality MCC.
The freshly pressed must is left in the cold, temperature controlled steel tanks for no less than 8 hours. It’s only after this period that the balling readings on the juice in the tanks are taken using the floating Thermometer. Balling is basically the unit of measurement that indicates the level of sugar in the juice. Also measured during this process is the temperature in the steel tanks. This may sound simple enough but if you have more than 50 steel tanks that are ready going up two floors and spread out in a huge winery that Graham Beck is and you have to check each and every one of those tanks, it is no stroll in the vineyard. I must say though, taking balling readings did bring back that romantic idea I had of wine making. I may have not been clad in that white Lab Coat and I certainly am not tall, dark and handsome and the only muscles I had (I’m saying HAD because they are gone now) were the ones I had picked up in the few hours I’d been at Graham Beck but it felt good going around, checking tanks, recording our findings and looking all important. Take away my Wellingtons boots and my black Harvest 2013 T-shirt and replace that with the Lab Coat and a few pens in my chest –pocket, I could have passed for a wine scientist – if they don’t exist, well, I have just invented one.
With Pierre’s supervision and approval, the juice or must with the right balling reading, will then go through the inoculation phase in which yeast is added to the juice in order to start the fermentation process. I am from a Zulu culture and I have observed my mother doing something similar when preparing uMqombothi, the traditional Zulu beer. This got me thinking, could my mother be on to something? Maybe. For all the non-wine makers out there, fermentation can be explained as the process where yeast enzymes eat on the sugar, converting it into alcohol…smiling already? I was too. Now we were talking business: alcohol, wine ,joy.
I must say that for my first day and the first time ever, I was doing very well. I am not an exercising person and I confess to never have seen the inside of the gymnasium in my life. The amount of physical workout I got from inoculating the juice in the tanks is enough to last me a lifetime, couple that with the occasional lifting of a few glasses of wine, who needs to go to the gym anyway? Inoculation involves a lot of lifting of heavy buckets and containers full of water and you must climb high on the tanks to actually add the solution into the tanks.
