Vendemmia

Yesterday morning, I bought new clippers, got in my car and drove the lengths of Highways 680 and 12, and much of Highway 29, ending up at the vineyard of Heather’s father and stepmother, Frank and Inger.

Their place is just south of Calistoga, in the middle of the Napa Valley, in fact, bordered on the east by the Napa River. It’s well off the highway, and so very quiet, peaceful and beautiful.

They have a huge deck shaded by a truly enormous oak tree, that dropped hundreds of ballistic acorns while we were there.

Heather, and later Stan, made ultimately futile attempts to sweep them up. Inger is already making wine, which she ferments in large garbage cans.

Heather hopped aboard the tractor to carry out the wooden lugs,

and we went out to pick grapes.

Stan even took some photos of me. Sine we were having a Napa Valley experience, we also stopped for lunch and wine.

That’s Bud and his daughter Laura, who are going about the winemaking in a serious way. Almost all of the grapes we picked went home with them, and they plan to buy a 30 gallon oak barrel and even build a shed to house it. My basement was deemed a wee but too inconvenient. We picked a bit more than 600 lbs of fruit,

which we determined by weighing it.

The stemmer-crusher is a fine example of Italian industrial design.

It’s pretty simple inside. A large auger runs along the bottom of the hopper, and stems get pushed out the side,

while the crushed grapes pour out the bottom.

Bud saw no reason to improve on the garbage can method, and we filled five large cans half full with the crush. They all went into the Explorer afterward.

We cleaned everything up and sat around on the deck for a while, feeling pleasantly tired and enjoying the sunset.

I brought home about 60 lbs of grapes to make my own batch of wine. On the to-do list is buying my own plastic garbage pail.