Sorting and chilling machine

Good Morning!

Sorry I missed posting this yesterday, I had my new synthetic ear drum put in my left ear and today I feel like Lindsay Wagner (well, not quite, still no sound or hearing happening, but I will keep you posted when it happens. After 6 years of silence in my left ear, I am about 3-6 months from hearing again).

Back to Chile and the Clos Apalta vineyards of Lapostolle wines. So I worked in the vineyards during picking and I said the grapes were picked then picked up on a flat bed tractor by really young high energy men. These guys would drive the tractors in between the blocks and pick up the full bins of freshly picked grapes then as quickly and carefully as possible load, stack and then head to the winery at the top of the hill. After each bin is full it probably weighs between 35-40 pounds, these guys are lifting 3-4 bins over and over and once the truck is full they have to strap the entire load on and off they go. The drive can take 10 minutes of 30 depending on how far they are from the winery. But when they get to the top there is a process of unloading and stacking that is fast accurate and really kinda fun to watch.

This is where I started my next part of the apprenticeship. When the grapes arrive you are in an area they call the reception area. Every morning between 60-80 women are there and ready to hand destem these grapes. These are the highest quality grapes and the winemaker chooses to manually sort all the grapes and hand pick each off the bunch. This might be the most back breaking work I have ever done. You grab a bin of grapes and take them to a large table you will share with 8 others. Then you get a smaller plastic box/bin and the grapes you will ultimately choose goes into that box.

So at first I thought this should be easy, but after asking some questions I found this work to be fascinating. I ask why only women do this job, I was told women were much more selective and they wanted no shriveled grapes, no under ripe grapes, no raisins and no leaves and no stem whatsoever in the final grapes going into the barrels. Women are better at doing this work and they are far more gentle. SO they gave me a pair of gloves and started me at a table. All the women around me had their heads down and would speak every so often but they spoke no english. I did learn from them when I was doing things right they would say “Claro”. That means sure or right….when I was doing something wrong they would grab the grapes and make me watch them and show me that I was leaving in too small of grapes or little bits of leaves. They were perfectionists and we both taught each other a few words in English and Spanish.

After 20 minutes of standing there, my back and legs were screaming already. I am used to moving around all the time so standing on the concrete was really eye opening. Also, my hands were freezing, the grapes are still chilly from the night coolness and I felt like I wanted to stand in place and jump up and down to keep my legs from locking up but my middle section was sweating because you work at such a fast pace. After my little box was full, I then took it over to the processing machine. Most women can sort 20-25 boxes a day alone. You know I love machines so this was interesting to me. The processing machine is a huge vibrating conveyor belt (I will work on this machine later in the afternoon), but what it does is it shakes all the grapes into one layer and you can visually check out the grapes and sort and pull out the ones that should not have made it. Moving very fast, the 3-4 people watching and sorting are lightening quick. I had the chance to work this part of the machine most of the next day, it is really insane how focused you need to be to catch such small flaws before the grapes get to the next phase of the machine.

All the while there were these guys who worked in the receiving area who did nothing but collect all the stems and unused grapes and took them away for composting. they had to load up these massive wagons and take the soon to be composted material down the hill by tractor to the composting area.

The grapes shoot into the blast chiller, they don’t freeze them just keep them cold and this equipment line is about 40-50 yards long. When the grapes are cold and sorted they go into either 55 gallon new oak barrels or they go into these large stainless steel containers that will transport them to the massive barrels that hold maybe 2000 gallons. All work at Lapostolle is done in a gravity environment. Each process moves the grapes lower and lower until it is 4 stories below in the 2 year cellar. I will go more into that as my jobs in the winery progress.

What happens once the grapes get into the barrels? The barrel macersation starts, meaning that the weight of the top grapes ruptures the lower grapes and they start to ferment (the yeast turns the sugars of the grapes into alcohol). There are very labor intensive jobs all through this process and I will discuss that next week. I still have at least another week worth of blogging to describe my apprenticeship before I can really start doing the tasting notes, so if you are waiting for tasting notes and such. I am getting closer to all those wonderful tastings I did at the 18 wineries I hit while in Chile!

Have a great weekend!

Much LOVE and wine!

Tammi

Purple hands from manual labor!!!!!

One of the pickers at Clos Apalta

Good Morning!

The next phase of my apprenticeship started in the vineyard. I would work with the picking crews. I did not pick grapes, I would have loved to try to pick for a few days but honestly, there is a true art to picking and these men and women have a true talent. This is back breaking, tedious work and they go at full speed for hours and hours with no stopping. They start at the moment light of the morning starts to come out. It is normally around 5 AM.

We were at the Clos Apalta vineyards and the winery is located at the top of the hill. So literally, as the grapes are getting picked they are being taken straight up to the winery to be processed. (I will go into the process at the winery in tomorrow). The Clos Apalta vineyard is cradled by huge hills and the sun does not hit the actual vines until 9:30 – 10:00 AM at this time of the year. The mornings are cool and by the time the sun starts to hit the grapes and your back you finally warm up a bit.

The man who is leads all the vineyards of Clos Apalta is Jorge Castillo and he has been there for 20 plus years. Everything in the vineyard is done by hand. It is very hilly and beautiful. A few things to keep in mind, the vineyard is bio-dynamic, they compost EVERYTHING for fertilizing during the off season and this is the premier vineyards for the wines Clos Apalta and BO RO BO. These wines are award winning and fantastic. The Clos Apalta was the number 1 wine in Wine Spectator just a couple of years ago.

To create such an amazing wine you can not cut corners. So when I watched the speed, care and accuracy of these pickers I was beyond impressed. Also, I had to keep in mind these workers are paid by how many bins of grapes they pick each day. They could have just ripped the grapes off and get them into bins and hurry and not care about quality. But these folks from Chile are proud and they don’t think the way many folks who are paid by volume naturally think.

So, some of my job in the vineyard was to work with the pickers and make sure they get the credit for each bin. How they have done this for years is a person stands at the end of each block of vines and when they bring a full bin of grapes they bring them to the end of the row and then I would hand them a plastic chip and they would put the chip into their pocket and at the end of the day they cash in the chips for their pay in cash. They called the chip a feacha (I am sure I a spelling this wrong) but it sounds like the word “feature” but said with a hard Chilean accent. And my job was called the Feachara, (this is also spelled wrong, but I can not find it anywhere on Google) the person who passes out the chips and hails down the trucks that bring the empty bins and would also pick up the freshly picked grapes. I would cover about 30 rows of pickers and each picker had a different approach, some would fill many bins and then bring them to the end of the row all at once and some would bring them after each bin was full.

These bins are heavy, sticky and this is manual labor at it’s core. They are hunched over for hours, in the cold mornings, then the sun comes out and it is hot. They can only pick until about 1:30 or 2:00 PM, it becomes too hot for the grapes to be picked. They work 6 days a week and they are happy and focused on their picking. They yell and laugh and pump each other up and cheer for a minute when they move to different blocks. The days I worked with them we picked Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Carmenere grapes.

The next phase for these grapes are to take a ride up the hill and into the sorting tables and the process of hand de-stemming grapes for hours. I will discuss this process on tomorrow’s blog!

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi

These are the chips I would give to each picker for each full bin of grapes they picked.

Pilar Rodriguez teaching me how to cook!

Good Morning!

This day of my apprenticeship might have been the most surprising day. It was Sunday and since they do not pick grapes on Sunday, everyone except a small handful of folks at both the Lapostolle wineries have the day off, including myself. So, they arranged a cooking class with Pilar Rodriguez. I had no idea of who she was until the night before and I looked her up on the net. I was excited to learn about typical Chilean cooking and maybe pick up some techniques in the kitchen, but I had no idea what was about to happen to my soul.

One of the chef’s at the Lapostolle residence Francesca picked myself and Aurelie (She works for Moet Henessy as a Brand expert out of NYC. Moet Henessy sends all employees, no matter what level to work part or all of the harvest at Clos Apalta or Cunaco after they are hired). Anyway, Aurelie is a trained Chef and Sommelier, but now works in the “business” end of the company. there were 4 students and we drove to a kinda remote cottage looking place in Santa Cruz, Chile and we hop out of the truck and the second I walked into the cooking studio, I knew I was someplace special.

Let me back up and tell you what I had learned about Pilar Rodriguez from the internet. I read she was kinda the founding mother of the local food movement in Chile. She had cooked for all the famous folks and been in every magazine, she once cooked dinner for a famous opera singer and he sang for her at his concert. She is to Chile what the most famous female chef is in the states (maybe a chick version of Todd English or the bald dude on Top Chef, Tom C.). I was kinda intimidated because I was being trained by a famous chef along with others who are also trained chefs. Remember when Paula Deen was on Iron Chef…kinda like that feeling. Who put the hillbilly in the kitchen thoughts were running through my mind.

When I walked in, I noticed it really was like the most quint cottage, a small but professional kitchen and she was about 5’5″ and dark hair, dark eyes and wearing a pink chef’s jacket. She handed each of us an apron with her name and cooking studio on it and at the bottom was printed, comida +vino, which means food and wine. She was so warm and charming and engaging and first she said we will start with the meat because it takes 3.5 hours and we can get it out of the way. Her english was perfect, her french was perfect and I assume her spanish is perfect too, but we all know I have no idea if it is or not.

We made a total of 5 dishes. Costillar en Adobo (Pork ribs/pork belly) rubbed in Merken peppers, kinda like paprika, but only in looks not flavor. We made Cebiche (cheviche with fresh corvine fish), Chupe, (a crab casserole kinda dish), Guiso de Mote (Barley and mushrooms side dish), and for dessert we made Leche Nevada (whipped egg whites floating in fruit and milk).

I am fully aware I have not done these dishes any favors with these lame descriptions, I will make up for that is just a minute and go into full detail how they tasted! What struck me was how light and easy of a place this serious chef had created. The room was state of the art but not huge and all the cabinets were open with no doors, all the plates, platters, cups and bowls were right there on the wall. All the spices and ingredents were right there in the open. It was impeccably clean and the kitchen had a step down to a dinning area that might be big enough for 10-12 people max. There was a set of french doors that made up the back wall and when you looked out, you saw a huge tree and small yard and of course the vineyards. It was a cottage in the middle of heaven.

So as she is giving out projects, cut up mushrooms, onions etc, I was asking her tons of questions and she would answer in a very matter of fact way. She was funny without trying to be and she was new to social media and we laughed at how people follow you even if your just eating a sandwich. She was so energetic without being a spaz. Just a super charming personality.

As the meat was basted and we were slicing fish to make the cheviche she said when she first decided to be a chef she was either 29 or 39( You know I can’t heard everything) and moved to Paris and had a tiny studio and every day she would take a train and smell like fish and food and they would be packed in the cars and she was not making any money and lived so modestly. She said at that time in Paris, nobody had dark eyes, her skin color and spoke Spanish, she was truly an outsider. She said it was lousy but she would walk across this one bridge each day on the way to work and back home and the view was so spectacular that it would stop her in her tracks and that moment made her feel anything was possible. She said she hung on that thought every day for 2 full years and while she was working she learned everything about french cooking she could. At the end of her time in France she moved back to Chile and started in a very high end restaurant and the rest is history…

So what I heard while she is telling this story is she was later in life changing careers for something she loved to do and she struggled through the low pay, living someplace she did not always feel welcome and she was fixated on those moments each day that made her feel like anything was possible. I found out later that she rarely teaches cooking classes unless someone is really a powerhouse, she never teaches on a Sunday and the fact that I was with her and my other classmates on this day was really divine intervention.

As the food all came together, and it did happen at the same time with perfect order and no chaos (unlike my home kitchen), I was standing there just watching her be excellent at what she does. She is a chef, not a cook. The food was not good, it was OUTSTANDING and of course all the wines paired perfectly with everything. This may have been one of the top 5 meals of my life. The meat was rich, roasted, fatty, suculent and wild. The salad was just greens and dressing and never has a salad tasted so perfect. The cheviche was the freshest most awesome fish I have ever had in my life. The trick is how you cut the fish and when you add the dressing. The barley mushroom side dish was earthy, rich and satisfying. The Chupe, was a huge surprise it tasted like this creamy seafood explosion in my mouth, but there was no cheese at all in the dish. The wines we had were all Lapostolle and each dish just built on to the next. By the time the dessert hit the table I was on sensory overload. I was a big ball of happiness.

I sat there are heard more stories from Pilar and the other gals about cooking and kitchen stories. I have only ever worked at the fryer station at the Dairy Queen in Yorktown, Indiana, so I had nothing to add, but just soaked up the time. We were there 4 plus hours and it felt like 30 minutes. When I knew the time was winding down, I felt sad, because I did not want it to be over. But I felt so blessed to meet and spend the time with Pilar and my other co-chefs I could not stop smiling.

People always amaze me. Sometimes, I don’t take the time to hear all the stories that are behind the person I am working with or standing next to, but when I do I am always inspired that no matter their situation, everyone has a story. Pilar Rodriguez inspires me, she is a strong, engaging and lovely woman. She has worked hard, stayed true to her cooking beliefs and after years of being real and authentic to who she is, she lives by her own rules and is a huge success. We are hoping to meet up in Washington DC later this summer, when Pilar is at a food industry event. I hope we always stay connected. If not, I pray she knows the 4 hours I spent with her, made a huge impact on my journey!

Tomorrow, I will discuss hand destemming grapes for the premier brand Clos Apalta wines.

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi

This is painted on the wall at Pilar's cooking Studio

Some of the tanks we took temps on 4-6 times daily

Good Morning!

By this point in my apprenticeship, I have spent tons of time with the tank team and today I was moved into the “lab” of the Cunaco winery of Lapostolle. This was really an area I was looking forward to, because, I am a small home winemaker and 20 gallons is the largest batch I have ever made at home. I was taken and introduced to 2 young women who I had seen for the last weeks all day taking temperatures of all the tanks, I had been working on. They were really friendly but their English was as strong as my Spanish.

I had figured out what they were doing just by watching but I had no idea of the science that went behind it. While working on the tanks doing pump-overs, we would get an updated list on how long each pump-over need to go on. One time it would be 22 minutes and later in the day the pump-over might need to be 24 minutes. I pieced together that the length of the pump-over must be related to the temperature of the juice inside the tanks. Actually, as the time the grapes are macerating goes on, the temperature is watched to see how quickly the fermentation is happening. It can get really warm in there and the CO2 coming off the skins can be toxic.

Lapostolle is a certified biodynamic winery, they do not add chemicals to the wines or vineyards to help the fermentation process along. So the temperature is the best way to see how far along we are in the process of becoming wine. After we would make the rounds of taking the temps we would head back to the office and enter them into a speadsheet that would calculate where each tank was in the fermentation process.This routine was done every 2 hours. About 50 tanks, 3 minutes each tank, you could not fiddle around. You had a clip board, and some of the huge oak barrels you had to crawl up on top and harness yourself in, so you would not lose balance and fall in. It was at time a very physically demanding task also.

After the rounds were done, we started on the next group of testing we had to do. Each morning many of the new grapes were being picked and we had to test them to ensure quality across the board in all the grapes being used. So while the grapes are being destemmed we would get 1 pound of grapes every hour that they were being received for processing. After we had a pound, we would put them in a ziploc bag and label them and after they were done producing we took all the bags, about 4-6 bags and you go into the lab and starting with the first bag, you picked out the grapes that were puny, raisined, stems, leaves, other things besides the grapes, weigh them, then you weigh the grapes, then you weighed the little stems, the weight of the three together needed to weigh the exact 1 pound. Then all that stuff went back into the sack…this was repeated until all bags were done an information was entered into the computer. After that we started checking sugar (BRIX) Levels. I had never checked sugar at this point, only at the picking on the vine level.

Then it got really interesting for me…they had every piece of equipment needed to check alcohol level’s specific gravity, water levels, potential gas levels…etc…The funny thing was if they wanted to talk about potsium levels or show me how a machine works we had to go to google translator and type it in spanish what they wanted to say and I would have to read it, then type in my questions or response, so we could understand each other. Of course we would laugh, because I would not arrange the questions in forms they understood and their responses to me would come to me in ways that turned the sentences into commands or choppy instructions. We all learned so much and laughed at the confusion. But the amount of work it takes to keep the wines moving into the beautiful finished wines was extreme.

Later in my program, I moved over to the Clos Apalta premier winery of Lapostolle and we were taking tempertures it was even more intense because these oak barrels had grape skins at about 12-15 feet high and the temps had to be taken at 3-4 different levels and the equipment is even more sensitive. It was a minute by minute learning process for me and I now must thank my friends at Scott’s Lab in CA for their help when I make wine. I send them a sample and they are able to run tests and I get a report back with the alcohol levels, the blend of the grape varieties, the chemical components and any gases that might be present in the wine.

Now, I know how, where and why it is done from the ground up, I know two things, I can do any of these tests and second, I need more education in this aspect of large batch winemaking….I will hire this position to be handled by an expert.

I worked with these quality and lab groups for days and it was very apparent that I need to know more. But I am already looking into classes and taking on another internship just focused in the lab of a winery!

Thanks for following my crazy journey tomorrow I will discuss taking a cooking class on my day off…Pilar Rodriguez, greatest Chilean chef of all time!

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi

View from on top of the red tanks at Cunaco.

Good Morning!

I am late posting because I have been watching the Royal Wedding and I read an article that discussed what the bride ate the night before the ceremony. In the article it stated she had Casa Lapostolle Sauvingnon Blanc, We had the same wine last night….for some reason I now feel connected to new Duchess!

So back to Santa Cruz, Chile. On this morning I meet Jerome, an amazing french man who happens to be one of the winemakers of Lapostolle. Jerome is one of the smartest and most passionate winemakers I have met. Jerome is also deeply educated about the vineyards as well. We met and as we drove into the vineyard he pointed out the Merlot, Cabernet, Carmenere, and the newly grafted Petit Verdot.

Jerome really is a teacher by nature and he stopped the truck and we got out and we pulled off a leave of each grape and explained how to tell each grape variety apart by looking at the leaves, by shape, color, and walked me through the process of grafting. Then we jumped on horses and took a wonderful, fun and relaxing ride through all the vineyards. We spent about 2-3 hours, that felt like lasted 20 minutes, but we weaved through the vines and blocks of grapes stopping to discuss anything from composting, to bio-dynamic vineyards, the certification of the vineyards to be bio-dynamic, and the philosophies behind winemaking, sugar levels, gravity wineries, oak vs stainless, you name it, I think we discussed it.

After our time on the horses Jerome grabbed a bottle of Sauvingnon Blanc by Casa Lapostolle and we went to Peruvian restaurant and we sat under a shady tree and talked about life. We ordered cheviche and sea bass. The wine paired beautifully and Jerome is an old soul and he discussed his winemaking career and I was fascinated. Besides learning about life in France and Chile, I learned of his love of travel and food. Jerome is a young vibrant man and the reason I go into this conversation so much is, as I write about so many winemakers I met, they all had a very common thread besides wine, each have a love of travel and trying new things from food and wines and strange places to vacation.

After we finished lunch it was time to work and Jerome took me to the CUNACO winery to meet the teams I would be working with. I first met Alex a team leader of the group that does all the tank work. Pumpovers, manual punch downs sanitation and everything involved with getting the fresh pressed white juice and the red grapes after the destemming into the tanks. It is hard and time consuming labor. They do everything using manual labor, because it treats the grapes more gently and produces a better finished produce. This plant produces Casa Lapostolle and Casa Alexendre wines.

As I worked with these guys I had the chance to taste the juice as it was becoming wine. each tank was pumped over up to 8 times a day and each day that passed I tasted all the wines and could taste as the fermentation was in progress. We worked hard and communication was sometimes tricky, most of the guys on the team knew a few english words and I understood most of what they said and if we could not understand each other a game of charades broke out. We laughed, we sweated, we learned, they taught me some Chilean Spanish, I taught them some English phrases. They discussed many aspects of their life and ask lots of questions about the the United States.

We worked 12 hours a day during the harvest and in the mornings it would be chilly while the grapes were being picked and by mid morning the fresh grapes would arrive and the day would amp up quickly and by the afternoon the sun would shine down and then it would be really warm up on the shiny stainless steel tanks, dragging hoses and connecting them and pumping the wine over the cap, then santitizing everything and move to the next tank while communicating with the person on the bottom or some times I was the person on the ground watching for anything that could happen. If I was on the bottom, I was running the pumps, moving equipment and keeping us on time and in proper order.

So that in a nutshell is what type of work I did when I was working for their team. Next week, I will start discussing the next team I worked with and what I learned.

Have a great weekend. Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi