Being picky

You’ve checked ripeness. The grapes are nearly ready. Almost there. You check the weather for the fifth time today. 28 degrees. Rain on Thursday. Quick math. Three days of hot weather will add 0.75 Brix. Pick in two days; that’s all the notice you get.

You send the text: “PG – 19.2/3.26/7.4”. Three phones chime. Frantic phone calls race around The County. You need a crew.

Grapes are harvested by crews. With all the heat we’ve been getting late into September, grapes are ripening quickly. That means our timeline is shrinking. It’s a hard year to find an available crew. So you reach out to friends and customers. Maybe even throw a message out on Facebook or Instagram.

While trying to find the crew, you also need to start prepping the pick. That means you wash dozens, sometimes hundreds of small bins. You go into the vineyard and remove protective nets. You run to County Farm Centre and buy more harvest snips; the good ones with the red handle.

The night before the pick, you’re on the crushpad cleaning and checking your juicing equipment. Do all the pistons work? Does the bladder hold pressure? Have you cleaned enough hose?

You don’t sleep before that night. You’d like to, but you can’t. Anxiety and excitement swirl in your stomach and hold you awake. You go to work around five am. You clean some more; not because you have to but because you need something to keep you busy.

Before the crew arrives, you go into the vineyard and cut samples; “keep fruit that looks like this, leave fruit that looks like that”. The crew pulls in around seven. There’s still too much dew on the berries. You wait in silence. At eight you call it: time to start picking. The crew disappears into the vineyard. You’re left alone.

What you do next is important. My advice? Find the best cup of coffee you can, it’ll be another long night.

Amelia Keating-Isaksen moved to The County two months ago. She’s the winemaker at Morandin Wines. On Friday morning, Amelia made the decision to harvest on Sunday. She spent Friday lining up a crew and checking her cellar equipment. She beat the Sun to work on Saturday – getting in early to clean equipment before the store opened.

On Sunday, Amelia started at 5 a.m.— couldn’t sleep. The morning was spent calibrating a new press. The crew disappeared into the vineyard around nine. She looked over her gear one more time then got a coffee.

The crew finished at four in the afternoon. Amelia paused, thanked each of them, then got back to work. For six hours she sorted through every cluster of grapes; choosing only the most perfect.

After sorting, the grapes were put into that freshly calibrated press. Methodically, Amelia controlled the pressure being applied; working on gut instinct to extract only the best juice.

She finished pressing at 1 a.m. She cleaned for an hour then went home. She was back on the crushpad early the next day. Rinse. Repeat.