Photo credit: @stollerwine instagram

Dave signed up for this 5 month long internship at Stoller Family Estate and has been living at the intern house for the last 3 months. Up until now we’ve seen each other on most weekends, but since harvest started, we see each other two to three days a month. I am officially a harvest widow. It’s a new season of mourning the loss of a husband during harvest – I better get used to this!

His days in the cellar lately consist of an array of tasks from moving, cleaning and labeling barrels, to cap management at the end of the day. Cap management refers to the cap (consisting of the grape skins, seeds, and stems) that floats to the top of the wine. During fermentation, the carbon dioxide pushes these to the surface. Without any intervention, the juice will have little contact with the skins where much of the color and flavor/tannins are extracted and the cap can insulate heat, inactivating yeast and stopping fermentation.  In addition, since the cap has contact with air, there’s an opportunity for aerobic bacteria to produce vinegar.

One might say cap management is arguably one of the most crucial tasks in wine making.

The cellar crew will perform punch downs where a tool is used to submerge the cap or pump overs where the wine is circulated on top of the cap. If you check out Dave’s Instagram feed, you’ll see videos of #capmanagement, specifically the pump over.

You really have to love the craft. He has been in the cellar over 12 hours daily, 6 to 7 days a week. And I can tell he truly enjoys it. Some people have asked me how I manage working, being pregnant, and raising our two daughters while he’s away. I tell them, I must love him a lot 🙂

Here’s a photo of Dave featured on yesterday’s Stoller Instagram post.

Just for laughs, here’s a well known version of cap management by Lucille Ball.

Exactly two years ago, I started documenting Dave’s garage winemaking adventures with his friend Beau Mora from Temecula. Dave found a local vineyard through a connection at Corvallis Brewing Supply called Borgo Pass Vineyards. If you ever have a chance to stop by the store, ask for Joel the store owner. Super helpful and friendly guy.

We got a ballpark date when the pinot noir grapes were ready for harvesting, but we decided to check it out ourselves. We took the girls for a little family outing (really, we just didn’t have a babysitter).

After some kickass nest making by Olivia and intense berry sampling by Dave, we finally had a baggie to sample. Crushing in a Ziplock… not as glamorous as a grape stomp. After straining and some settling, finally he took a dropper and tested the brix through a nifty refractometer from Ade Advanced Optics that we purchased off Amazon.

After three readings, he got an average of 24 brix. Which is an ideal brix and this meant they were ready for harvesting. However, through his experience at his previous job, he knew that the random sampling wasn’t a true representation of the population. The seeds were still a little too green and crunchy for his liking. So, we waited some more to pick them. He thought it may need another few more days but what complicated things was that the weather forecast predicted rain the next two days which would dilute the concentration of the grapes. We needed to wait until the grapes were dry and stabilized again. It was about a week before we ended up harvesting with Beau. A practice of patience before the cellar work began.

While we were there, we met a retired crop and soil science professor from OSU named John who was planning to make champagne (or sparkling wine if you want to be technical). His family was a fifth generation Napa family. Champagne is made from a combination of red and white grapes (pinot noir, pinot meunier and chardonnay). The grapes were from another block and their brix was slightly lower, 20. They weren’t as ripe as the ones Dave sampled. However, pinot noir grapes are picked earlier for champagne due to a need for higher acidity. Dave also met a chemist and his wife who were harvesting grapes for their own wine this fall.

It was a successful berry sampling trip and based off of that day’s sampling, Beau bought his ticket from California to join the winemaking process which would take about a week.