The Wines Are Coming! The Wines Are Coming!

Bumper-to-bumper traffic, congestion, crazy drivers, flaring tempers. Sounds like the Terwilliger curves around 5 o'clock, right?

Pinot noir grapes from Sunnyside Vineyard.

Well, commuters, you can be comforted knowing you're not the only ones feeling the pain of too much traffic in too few lanes. The normally idyllic backroads of Oregon wine country, from NE Gun Club Road to the Dayton Cutoff and beyond, are clogged with hundreds of old rattle-traps loaded to the point of collapse with grapes destined for wineries big and small, up and down the valley.

Pinot gris straight from the vines.

The harvest this year is rumored to be one of the best since the fabled '08 vintage, maybe even as good as the best the state has ever seen. The long, dry Indian summer with its warm days and cool nights has been ideal in the region's vineyards. Winemakers and vineyard managers, the folks who control the levers of the harvest as far as how the vines are groomed and when the grapes are ready, have had the pleasure of actually letting the fruit hang until it's reached its moment of perfection, without the pressure of impending rain or frost.

How much is ten tons of grapes? 37 bins, sorted in one day!

For the third year in a row, Brian Marcy and Clare Carver of Big Table Farm allowed me to come out and help sort the grapes that'll be going into their 2012 pinot noir and pinot gris wines. In previous years, vigilance was required to spot mold hiding in the tightly-packed clusters. And this year there was almost no damage from birds, which caused a huge problem two years ago (compare the photos above with those from 2010).

The beautiful Lucy Hoffman applying some gentle pigeage.

In both those years, the conveyor belt carrying the fruit had to be slowed way down so we could better see any flaws, and we ended up tossing out copious amounts of fruit. This year the grape clusters were gorgeous and the belt whizzed by, since all we had to do was pick out leaves and debris. (I even got to save a praying mantis that had somehow fallen into the bin.)

Thanks, Clare, for a great day!

It was a pleasure to grab a cluster and chomp down, letting the fruit explode in my mouth. Standing on the line was also much nicer this harvest, too, with the warm-but-not-hot sun on my back and the yellow jackets few and far between.

I can't wait to taste of the wines from this vintage when it's released next year, having experienced how luscious the fruit was. Knowing the talent of the winemakers we've got around here, I'm guessing it'll be legendary.

I Worked the Line

When someone talks about ten tons of something, what does that mean, exactly? Well, yesterday I found out.

Clare loving on her grapes.

This is the second year I've helped sort the grapes that Clare and Brian turn into their Big Table Farm wines. The task involves standing next to a conveyor belt for several hours as clusters of grapes, picked from their vines that morning, are brought to a winery and dumped from the big plastic field crates onto the belt. Sorters pick out and toss clusters that show signs of rot or mold and any leaves or sticks that they find. If there are just a few grapes on a cluster that are bad, it's permissible to pull those few off.

The clusters can range from plump and solid with hardly any rot to slimy and squishy and mildewed from top to bottom. The tricky ones are mildewed on the inside, so it's important to turn each cluster over and look really closely for any signs of fuzz or browning, then check inside to see if just a few are bad or if the whole cluster is a loss. And that's while keeping an eye on the other clusters that are whizzing by on the belt.

Unsorted pinot gris clusters.

One thing I learned is that when winemakers taste their grapes, there's none of this washing them off and delicately picking off one grape at time. A cluster is grabbed right off the line, chomped into, chewed and swallowed to get the taste of the whole cluster. After all, one grape by itself may be extra sweet or not ripe, and won't give a sense of the whole, so it's important to do this several times for each batch. And hopefully without also consuming the spiders, earwigs or other critters that call these clusters home.

The crew at table.

Each full field crate weighs about half a ton, and yesterday we were doing about one-and-a-half to (maybe) two tons per hour. That includes loading the crates onto the sorting machine, sorting the grapes, taking the crate off the machine and rinsing it off while another crate is loaded on. Sometimes there's a pause to switch out crates on the other end when they get full. Or to switch from destemming the clusters to letting whole clusters go through for a different kind of fermentation.

But otherwise it's several hours of standing, working, talking, laughing and occasionally doing some badly needed stretching. When you're done you're sticky, sweaty and tired all over. There's usually an amazing meal served someplace in there, too, which is always highly anticipated and immensely satisfying. And do I feel lucky to be able to help? Oh, yeah.

For a quick view of the harvest in action (and some great photos), check out the Big Table Farm blog.

Wine at the Right Time

For some occasions you need to pull out the good stuff, and good friends coming over for dinner certainly fits in that category. Especially considering one of the guests successfully solved the puzzle of the strange fruit trivia contest from back in October. Additionally, he's my friend and the managing editor of NW Palate magazine, Peter Szymczak. (No, I didn't give him any hints…he apparently just knows odd bits of trivia about fruit.)

John out in his vineyard.

And since he's also a wine geek, I pulled out one of the magnums of Thomas Pinot Noir that I've had squirreled away in the basement for several years. Seven, to be exact. Dave and I get one every year for Christmas through the generosity of my brother, who must not remember the time I dressed him up in an old bathrobe with a pot on his head and then got my folks to take a picture. But that's another story.

The menu demanded a luscious red wine, with beef bourguignon I'd made the day before and held over to let the flavors meld thoroughly, served with polenta made from Ayers Creek Farm's Roy's Calais Flint corn and a radicchio caesar salad. And I could think of nothing that could better complement all this goodness than the product of John Thomas' hand-tended four-acre plot near Carlton.

The old winery building.

John is better known for his Acme Wineworks non-vintage pinot noir, a very decent wine in its own right, but one that pales in comparison to the estate pinot noir that he barrel-ages for a full two years before releasing it. At first blush this wine showed good fruit with lots of top notes, but shortly it warmed and mellowed, the earth and berry flavors coming out.

It only got better in the following hours and, when everyone had gone home after devouring the apple chutney pie for dessert with some of Peter and Diana's homemade nocino, Dave and I finished off the last sips, thankful for being privileged enough to be able to enjoy a wine as startlingly well-made as this.

Getting the Gist of Oregon Gris

Yet again the Western world's cognoscenti are finding out that there's a lot to like about the NW when it comes to the finer things in life. It's not only Portland cutting-edge chefs getting featured in the NYT, followed quickly by the Guardian of London touting the groovy shopping to be done here, but now the Gray Lady's wine steward, Mr. Eric Asimov, is getting on board.

Most East Coasters, when they think of Oregon wine, only conjure tired clichés about our pinot noir by old-line producers like Eyrie and Ponzi (not that there's anything wrong with their wine), completely missing excellent winemakers like John Paul at Cameron, rock superstar Jay Somers at J. Christopher, Peter Rosback at Sineann and David O'Reilly, the genius behind O'Reilly's and Owen Roe.

Asimov's Wines of the Times in today's Dining Out section devotes significant column inches to a taste-off of a classic of Oregon's wine scene, our pinot gris. He covers gris made by bigger producers like Adelsheim, Willamette Valley, Yamhill Valley, King Estate and Erath, and includes a few lesser-known wines by the likes of Montinore, Capitello, Stringtown, Lemelson and A to Z. Adelsheim's 2006 Willamette Valley pinot gris was chosen as best value, though it was priced at $18, pretty much the high end of their top 10 picks.

The description calls it "rich and almost oily in texture, with balanced, complex aromas and flavors of lemon, flowers, minerals and almonds." And, while it's no doubt a fine wine and was fairly judged against it's competitors, I would have included the lovely versions made by Evesham Wood, Westry and Chehalem. Then what about those from Sineann and St. Innocent?

Maybe they can't get these other outstanding examples in far-off New York, but I'd say we have an embarrassment of riches here. Or, as Tony Shalhoub's engineer says in Galaxy Quest, "Just FYI..."