Autumn is a wonderful time to experience harvest. All year, crops are carefully grown and groomed while pests are managed. A farmer is betting everything on good weather and a high sales price. With nothing more than strong faith in what’s happened in the past, farmers hope and wait to see the outcome. Some years are wonderful. Some years, a farmer just turns away to start preparing for the next. That’s the world of real farming.
These days, the little central coastal towns that we’re visiting are in the swing of celebrating fall. There’s a custom that has grown as the years have gone by. The display of the scarecrows. Scarecrows that are seen doing everything from bee keeping to swashbuckling. Each shop owner has put their own spin on their scarecrow. The results are worth seeing.
Colorful and whimsical, these works of art are displayed through the month of October, adding to the number of tourists. Thousands trek to the coast just to see them. Truly adorable.
While visiting, wine tasting was suggested as a possible activity. Having owned my own vineyard raising grapes for Sunmaid raisins, I’ve seen a thing or two. Born into a family that produced grapes for wine and raisins for almost a century, Great-grandparents, Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, and even cousins, were all in the business. Over the year, we learned a thing or two.
This, I can assure you. Harvest is a exhausting race between sunlight, the weather, and the ability to find employees to help harvest the crop. Every single road block you can imagine happen while harvesting a crop that needs to be picked in the span of a few days. Nature doesn’t wait. Fruit continues to gain sugar until, at a single moment in time, it passes its peak. A great farmer hits the sweet spot year after year.
Weather is always fun. Rain and raisins don’t go together. At least five years of the seventeen that I farmed, VST and I were found at 3 AM at the local pancake house. As rain fell on our crop, we’d look out the window, helpless and shaken. All five years, we managed to fix the damage. Rain and raisins are just a bad combination.
Production costs for a raisin crop were around $50,000 for our 40 acre vineyard (1990-2007). Payments for the previous crop were carefully timed, paying for pruning, chemicals, paper trays, and the next harvest. Checks came in. Checks went out. Such is the world of farming.
Yesterday, I visited a toy vineyard and winery. I say this because I know the real thing. In a real harvest, people are so dirty their eyelashes hold a layer of dust. This “grape snipper” was in khaki’s and clean tennis shoes.
“They’re harvesting!!!!” said the woman serving us their version of a chardonnay.
Funny. I heard no shouting, tractors, or barking dogs. No signs of a typical working vineyard. Confused I looked around and what I saw made me laugh from the depths of my belly.
There sat one lone bin of red grapes. A very small plastic bin, maybe 3’x3’x3′. No set of doubles. No forklift dumping a trailer load of grapes. No leaves. Mice. Lizards. Coyote poop. Any of the real stuff that gets dumped with a load of grapes.
Just this little bin of shiny little grapes. Each berry so clean, surely they hired elves to dust them on a daily basis. The employee wasn’t covered with dust of any kind. Looking like he had just popped out from behind a desk, he worked a toy fork lift to move the one bin inside. After gently setting the bin down, he walked over to some dry ice and threw one small scoop on the top of the bin.
A wild fermentation process starts the minute grapes are cut. Wine makers have their own idea of controlled fermentation and don’t want the wild process to start. I assure you. One quart of dry ice on a bin of grapes would do nothing to stop that process. My brain laughed so hard I had to turn away.
Yesterday, I tasted a lot of very sad wines. Wines that were $50 a bottle, and not worth a space on the shelves at Discount Grocery. Very fancy store fronts with fussy people. Terms like bouquet made me laugh in my brain. The descriptors were provided by a fancy writer with a great imagination. Such is the world of wine tasting.
The last place I visited had the best idea of all. They had bottled pieces of grape vines pruned off at the end of a season. We would light bonfires to get rid of this debris at our ranch. Little did we know we were sitting on a gold mine. There on the shelf, they were selling this stuff, adorably bottled, priced at $28 a pint. Labeled as a BBQ additive for a hint of grape wood on your steaks, this was a brilliant marketing idea. Take trash and turn it into extra cash. They got the best score for squeezing the most profit out of their vineyard.
All in all, I still don’t like wine. I’ve seen too much. Having worked at Paul Masson Winery on the swing shift, I know about quality control. I worked in the lab, testing for all kinds of chemical standards found in good wines. It takes an army to make a reproducible product year after year. It takes truckloads of grapes, arriving in a steady stream. It takes hundreds of people who get very dirty. It’s dangerous and on a large scale.
I do like doll houses.
Pretend wineries?????
That remains to be seen.
Have a great day.