1859 Sept | Oct 2012_opt

ine Crush
WINEMAKING
The prior year was a tough one, too. In 2010, grapes on the vine broke into bloom perhaps
two weeks later than most viticulturists wanted, setting the farmers’ internal clocks
forward to when the first fall frost might come. True, this is Oregon, where people talk
about the unpredictable growing season with the same lack of alarm as Tuesday. For farmers,
though, the weather can mean feast or famine.
As tenuous as that year was, Petterson considered 2010 merely a warm-up for what he
was facing in 2011. He had begun making wine ten seasons ago, with his first solo vintage
in 2008 only three years gone. “That was a dream year,” Petterson recalls. “The summer was
on the cool side, not super rainy, and it was followed by a warm, dry August and October.
It was great … and it was the complete opposite of 2011.”
Behind the scenes at Oregon’s latest wine crush on the books, activities resembled the
many harvests that preceded it, but, in some respects, this year was unlike anything winemakers
had experienced before.
After the biggest gamble of many winemakers' lives, the harvest began in the Pacific
Northwest. In McMinnville’s Pinot Quarter, or what winemakers affectionately call the
"Pinot Ghetto," grapes arrived at a grouping of warehouses, grain elevators and other
buildings, which were once dedicated more to carbohydrates than to grapes. Among the
wines produced here are Panther Creek, R. Stuart, Domino IV and special one-off projects
of winemakers in a couple of nondescript buildings.
Panther Creek’s production facility is a handsome 1923 McMinnville electric station
constructed with brick—yet showered with light from two knee-to-roof arching train depot
windows. The mood is remarkably upbeat. This facility houses a commune of winemakers
and industry workers this time of year. There is Michael Stevenson, who makes
wine for Panther Creek; Petterson and Mark Stock, who make wine for Vista Hills; Martha
Karson, a retired psychology professor from Michigan State University who works with
Vista Hills; and Robert Blasier, a traveling winemaker with a goal of making six wines in
five different countries.
It is now November 2nd and the latest harvest in the fifty-year modern history of Oregon
winemaking is finally under way—all part of a crush tradition thousands of years
in the making.
One of the earliest incarnations of a wine crush dates to 4,100 B.C in Migdal Haemek,
a small village in northern Israel. In January 2011, a team of archaeologists from University
of California at Los Angeles, working with Irish and Armenian scientists on the
site, discovered a rectangular basin with a small ledge on the uphill side and drainage
holes on the downhill side. The international team had found what they believe to be
the world’s oldest wine press. In the first gravity-fed press, these ancient people stomped
grapes with their bare feet. The grape juice would flow downhill and into a collection
basin through holes that were stuffed with grasses and bushes that acted as a natural
filter. Perhaps the juice fermented in these basins or was collected in earthenware jugs
and taken to a cellar for fermentation.
Today, the process has remained functionally the same, though machines play the primary
role and bare feet play only a negligible fetish role in production. Gravity, however,
remains a key force in production.
In large wooden or plastic bins, the fruit arrives at Panther Creek by truck and is forklifted
onto an electric “tipper,” with stainless steel arms whose angle can be continuously
adjusted to allow more or fewer grapes to slip down onto a conveyor belt. It’s on this
production line that crush workers perform their first acts—identifying and tossing out
unripe grapes, grape bunches with “ear” clusters that don’t grow as well and those obviously
infected with Botrytis, or “bunch rot,” a fungus that kills yeast during the crucial
fermentation process.
Martha Karson gently pulls the joystick and the perfect pinecone-shaped clusters of
Pinot noir grapes roll past her and fall into a machine that crushes them and separates
them from their stems. After a splash of sulfur dioxide, used as an anti-microbial and as a
perserving agent thorughout a wine's aging process, the resulting grape juice is then stored
inside the facility in large bins, where it will remain until fermentation has run its course.
From these bins, Petterson draws wine samples into an arm’s length syringe then
1859 oregon's mAgAzine SEPT OCT 2012 1