Wine Stained Hands: Harvest At St. Mark's Vineyard

This has been a weekend full of new experiences. On Friday I rented a 16-foot long flatbed truck and drove it to the winery to collect some picking bins. This is the first time I’ve driven such a big truck and it was actually pretty easy to drive. I drove it home and parked it in front of our house for the night (Oscar was very excited to see it and to explore the inside of the cab). At 6:30 Saturday morning, my friend Steve came over and we drove the truck up to St. Marks Vineyard in the Russian River Valley to harvest the grapes. Mark and Ginny Weston, invite their friends and family over to help with the harvest. It had rained the night before so the vineyard was a little wet, but by the time we started picking at around 8:30, the sun was starting to peek out from behind all the clouds. With buckets and clipping shears in hand, we entered the vineyard and starting harvesting. It was a fun time and seemed to go pretty quickly. I have never actually harvested grapes before and it was nice to be involved in the process knowing that he grapes I was picking will soon become Eight Arms Syrah. By 11:30 we (there were about 20 of us) had finished harvesting the two blocks and had picked around 3 tons of grapes. Not bad for a bunch of novices. In comparison, a professional crew can pick about the same amount of fruit in under an hour. But I’m sure they don’t have as much fun! We followed the pick with lunch on Mark and Ginny’s porch and drank a few bottles of the 2006 Eight Arms Syrah to celebrate the occasion. The wine tastes great and is finally coming out of bottle shock. It’s very fruity with a balanced mouth feel. Once the truck was loaded it we drove the one and a half hours back to the winery. We unloaded the grapes, hand-sorted and destemmed them into a couple of half-ton fermentation bins. This morning I went back up to the winery to check the sugar and acid levels. The grapes looked pretty good but the sugar levels were a little bit lower then expected. This will not be a powerful Syrah but more of a refined Northern Rhone style. I’ll keep you posted. Thanks to everyone for there help yesterday. Enjoy the pictures.