I've settled into a routine here in Napa. I start work at 9 pm and go through to about 1am. I travel to the ranches we are picking for the night and let the crews in on the picking plan, mostly they know what's going on anyway, let them know about any changes, make sure everything is in place and make sure the harvesters are picking as clean as possible. There are up to 7 harvesters picking each night at two to four ranches (they call vineyards ranches over here). I start again at 7 in the morning and go through to about 11 helping out where I'm needed, no set role. Then I go up to St Helena at about 1 pm to the Beringer winery to sit in on the picking planning meeting with the winemakers. Its not an exhausting day but I get to hang with the vineyard operators and foreman at night, practice my Spanish, and during the day I hang with the managers and winemakers so i'm happy with the arrangement. Next week that may change as most of the chardonnay will be off and we will be getting into the Cabernet. There will be a lot of fiddly hand picks next week to extract parcels of A grade cabernet from various blocks.
I got to see a picking crew from Paso in action on Tuesday morning. These guys were flying. As the director of vineyard ops here put it "those guys really haul ass, don't they?' I took some video, included below. I will say though the picking conditions were as good as it gets; no leaves in the way, big chardonnay bunches and a cool morning. The eleven guys had picked 4 ton in the first 30 minutes of the day, about 360 kgs each in half an hour!!!
One of the videos show how they dump the full bins to save as much time as possible. The turn around of the tractors need to be quick because the pickers are going so fast.
Last weekend one of my roomie's and I had a look around Sonoma Valley. Sonoma Valley runs parallel with Napa Valley to the west. There is only a small mountain range separating the two regions. Sonoma is a little less polished than Napa and sees fewer tourists but there is some nice wines there and it is where Chateau St Jean is located.
I'll throw some photos in below with the captions explaining what they are.
 |
| Every morning Balloons go up |
 |
| more balloons |
 |
| Chateau St Jean in Sonoma Valley |
 |
| Gamble Ranch |
 |
| A couple of cool hombre's (Napa south mgr) |
 |
| Petite Syrah (Duriff), Stag's Leap |
 |
| More Petite Syrah, Stag's Leap |
I'm trying to get to San Francisco on the weekend so I'll post next on Sunday night.
Scott
No comments:
Post a Comment