Syrah in my Closet
Written By: Michael Keba on Thu, Nov 15th 2007
My little adventure went something like this:
- I searched Craigslist.com for wine grapes
- I found an ad for syrah grapes about 30 minutes away from me, listed at 75 cents/pound
- Upon inquiry, the owner said that they would be ready that weekend
- I started school the next day
- Talked to owner and made plans to get to the vineyard at 10 am Sunday
- Woke up Sunday and biked to other side of Davis' campus
- Picked up a friend's car at fraternity house
- Drove to WalMart in Woodland and bought plastic trash cans
- Drove another 45 minutes to the vineyard located in Suisun Valley
I had ten minutes to peruse around while the owner drove home from his grandson's baseball game. Like most people, I'm a complete novice to this whole experience. In fact, this was my first time at a vineyard during harvest season. I thoroughly enjoyed my transcendentalist moment; admiring the artistry of tamed nature wrapped around wooden trellises. Midnight colored clusters stretched row upon row as far as I could see.
A rumble from the owner's extended cab pickup broke my trance. A tall middle-aged man and a young blonde boy stepped out. I introduced myself and explained my project. The student factor worked in my favor, and he cut me a deal - 40 bucks for "all the grapes I need." Five minutes later, the two hopped back in the truck, and I had the whole place to myself again.
Unfortunately, I was missing two important tools: helping hands and gardening clippers. The recruitment of my friends had failed miserably, but I hadn't really expected any help from them before noon. However, I never thought about the mechanics of actually picking these grapes. The owner didn't have any kind of clippers, so he lent me a box cutter on the condition that I promise not to slice a finger off.
I spent the next couple hours carefully filling my plastic trashcans with the delicate fruit. It's better that the average wine drinker doesn't know this, but there were hundreds of tiny spiders crawling over the grapes. It was impossible to get all of them off. I'd guess that quite a few of these make it into the typical bottle of wine, but I haven't gotten that far along in process yet.
At this point I estimate that I have about a hundred and fifty pounds of grapes in my apartment. I have no proper equipment and just a little bit of knowledge of what to do next. However, I'm not too worried. Certain situations require immediate attention if the end goal is ever to be reached. Sometimes you can't be too meticulous about details if you want something done. If I had waited until I had everything organized, this project would probably end up hold until next year. Besides, the goal of this is not to make world-class wine, but to learn from the experience. I'm going to take this one step at a time, and now I need to plan what I'm going to do for the crush tomorrow.
Stay tuned and follow my homemade wine adventure!
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