The clock showed 6:30 a.m. Even though it was still dark outside and she had slept just five hours, Kathryn forced herself out of bed. It was harvest season and grapes had hit the tanks. So it was time for the daily tank walk.
During the three-month-plus harvest, our winemakers open up the spigot at the bottom of each and every tank each and every single day to monitor how the juice within is progressing and help its evolution. They’ll visit some tanks multiple times per day if further action or time-sensitive decisions need to be made. During those recurring tastings, the winemakers decide how they’re going to handle the fermentation of each tank at that particular time in order to capture the wine they’re aiming for. They may increase the temperature, decrease the temperature, or expose the juice to oxygen to soften the tannins. They’ll check sugar levels and decide how best to bring the juice in contact with the cap (that top layer of grape skins, stems, and pulp) to achieve the perfect level of extraction when it comes to the wine’s flavor, tannins, and aromas. Since each vineyard—and each block within each vineyard—is different, each tank requires a different approach and every tasting provides a unique opportunity to build the wines. That’s why there are never any days off during harvest for our winemaker Steve Leveque. He can’t afford to miss a single tank walk.
We love joining in on the tank walks whenever we can, although Kathryn goes along far and away more often than Craig does.
Not much need for makeup, Kathryn told herself as she put on eyeliner, shadow, mascara, and blush in anticipation of the early tank walk. Definitely no lipstick or gloss. We’ll be sharing wineglasses in 30 minutes and lipstick stains on the communal glass are not cool.
She threw on her jeans and pulled on the dark blue rubber Chanel boots she adores—practical but with a little flair from the two little rubber flowers on each side. Maybe someday when I grow up I can wear regular shoes on a tank walk, but not yet, she thought. I still can’t spit well and in a line.
Her spitting may not be up to par, but her solution to the problem works.
“I love your boots,” one of the cellar interns from Argentina had exclaimed during the prior day’s tank walk.
The comment both flattered and impressed Kathryn. She likes to see flickers of style in the tank room, just as she enjoys looking up at the art we have installed above and around the fermenters as she and the winemakers work their way through the morning. As she moved on to the next tank, she made a mental note to find out the girl’s name.
Although we make wine in both the Rutherford and St. Helena facilities, this tank walk would start at St. Helena since that winery has many more tanks to go through and more decisions to be made. Opting to leave the top down on the car during the drive that takes just nine minutes at the crack of dawn, Kathryn felt herself waking up thanks to the sharp freshness of the wind. She inhaled deeply, taking in the vinous and slightly sour fragrance that permeates the valley during harvest when all the wineries are fermenting.
A TV journalist would be walking with them that morning, a primary reason behind the eye makeup. Michiel Vos, a Dutch TV personality and journalist living in the U.S. whom Kathryn knows through his mother-in-law, Leader Nancy Pelosi, was doing a story on Napa Valley. Michiel and the cameraman were already at the winery when Kathryn arrived. Together the three headed to the lab to get their tasting glasses and then went in search of Steve Leveque, our director of winemaking, Megan Gunderson, our assistant winemaker, and Gabriel Valenzuela, then our cellar master. Vintners get a lot of attention and winemakers are the movie stars of Napa, but this train wouldn’t even have run much less started on time without Gabe.
By 7 a.m., the group that would participate in the morning tank walk stood in front of the first tank. Steve and the other winemakers never just rely on their fantastic memories about what’s been done to the wine in each tank and how it tasted the time before. As they progressed from the first tank to the one next to it to the one next to that, they reviewed the running record of how the juice in that tank had been handled. The date it came in. The Brix (measure of sweetness) level. The temperature throughout each day and how that translated to a change in the Brix or in taste.
We hold the juice at 50 degrees Fahrenheit to discourage fermentation and to allow for the extraction of flavors and other qualities that stem from leaving the skins on the juice before fermentation begins. Once we start fermentation, we have different options for flavor extraction. For the Pinots, we generally keep the temperature in the 50s for four to six days. For the Cabernets, the extensive cooling process can last four to ten days. When we start allowing the temperature to rise, which it does naturally during the fermentation process, the Pinot ferments quickly and in big leaps. Cabernets are slower. In either case, the juice must be tested several times each day to make sure the process is continuing as Steve wants.
The group began to taste, opening a small bottle drawn by an intern an hour earlier from the first tank. They poured a small sample in each person’s glass. Kathryn and the rest took a sip, let it linger on their palates, and then spit it out—Steve into the floor grate 2 feet away, and Kathryn, although she aimed at the same place, onto her boot.
Discussion then ensued about what to do with this particular tank, mostly a back-and-forth between Steve and Megan who, at that point, had worked together for six harvests. Although they are not always in agreement, we both love watching their communication with each other.
“Do we keep the temperature as it is?” “Is the flavor developing as we want?” “Is it ready to start the fermentation process?”
Within a couple of minutes, a decision had been reached and the directives marked on the instruction card for the cellar master and his team to execute. Then the group moved to the next tank.
At no time was the wine assessed qualitatively. That doesn’t happen until the blending season. So we can have a truly special wine in the making, like the Exzellenz Cabernet Sauvignon we had made three years prior, but have no idea that it will vault us into downright rarified company. (That shocker would hit just a few days after this particular tank walk.)
In a dining setting you start first with the white wine then go to the reds, but not in a tank walk. The tank walk crew got to our Sauvignon Blanc after about 90 minutes. This is when the communal glass comes in. We clean all the red wine out with a blast of Sauvignon Blanc that we pour from one glass to the next until the last person tosses it out.
Once the glasses were clean, or as clean as they’d get on a tank walk, a real sample of Sauvignon Blanc was poured into each glass.
Yuck! Kathryn said to herself after tasting the juice. Sauvignon Blanc is tough during the fermentation process. It’s sour and has a Heineken beer quality (remember a weed is a rose out of place), with little redeeming quality until the end.
Kathryn steeled herself for the rest of the tanks that she’d have to get through. One of the Sauvignon Blanc samples, however, surprised her. It was lovely, its Muscat clone giving a beautiful illusion of sweetness and fruit that all the tasters loved. We bought the fruit that had gone into that particular tank from our neighbors across the street, the Heitz family. What a wonderful vineyard. Hopefully, they’ll continue to sell to us.
By now, Michiel, despite his knowledge of wine, was looking a little bit bored. The morning’s tank walk had taken a little over two hours, even though we were only three-fourths of the way through harvest at this point, which meant that about half of our tanks were still empty. A week later, it would take more than three hours just to get through the tanks at St. Helena, before driving up to Rutherford to work on those wines.
After the last tank, the small group walked out of the tank room and into the light, always one of Kathryn’s favorite moments of the day. Having walked sleep-deprived into the tank room when it was dark and cold, she emerged with the bright, beautiful California sun shining in her eyes.
I love it, she said to herself. Let the day begin.
Most winemakers around the world follow their own particular recipe that dictates how they handle the tanks during fermentation. They’ll taste every day, but they don’t usually make any substantial modifications. At HALL Wines and WALT Wines, every tank walk presents a unique opportunity to build each one of our wines day by day. The ultimate goal is to pull everything good out of the grape and leave behind everything we don’t want, thereby creating a perfectly textured, balanced wine.