harvest

December 03 – “Flower”

by Grape Stomper Todd on December 3, 2010

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Today we learn how grapes get it on!

On this day in 1842, Charles Alfred Pillsbury was born in Warner, New Hampshire. He worked his way through college at Dartmouth, then moved to Montreal to be a clerk in a mercantile exchange. There he saw the demand for grain products from the Midwest, so in 1869, Charles Pillsbury moved to the growing city of Minneapolis and established his flour business. “Kneadless” to say, his profits there began to rise and he made an incredible amount of dough.

Sorry, those were some really half-baked puns.

This brings us to our wine word of the day: Flower

Not baking flour, I mean flower flower like “she loves me, she loves me not kind of flower” or the kind of flowers a guy buys when he’s in big trouble with his lady. But I’m digressing.

Grapevines do flower, but not into pretty ones you’d give your mom on Mother’s Day. Flowering is the 2nd stage of the lifecycle of a grapevine. The first stage is bud break, then flowering, then the third stage is fruit set, the fourth is veraison, and the fifth stage is harvesting.

Flowers are all about sex. Remember all that stamen, pollen, and stigma stuff in biology class? No? Well neither did I until I got into this business. So, here’s the short course on how grapevine flowers “do it.” Most commercial vines are hermaphroditic meaning the flowers can pollinate themselves. Kinda kinky, huh?

So,when a sperm cell in the pollen tube unites with an egg cell in the ovary, an embryo (a new seedling plant) is produced. The embryo grows within the developing seed, while the entire ovary grows to become the grape berry itself with seeds contained within.

That right, grapes are ovaries. Wait a minute, that means Grape Stomper Todd is really an Ovary Stomper.

Hold on…I think I’m gonna be ill…

Tagged as: bud break, flower, fruit set, harvest, ovaries, pollination, veraison

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October 7 – “Crush”

by Grape Stomper Todd on October 7, 2010

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (2.9MB)

This is a depressing day for grapes and Cumberland College.

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On this day in 1916, the Georgia Tech college football team smashes Cumberland College 222-0. That score still stands as the most lopsided game in college football history…and for Cumberland Collage, the most depressing.

That brings us to our Wine Word of the Day: Crush

Yes, it is a wonderful time of year. It’s football season AND the wine harvest is on! That means we hope our favorite teams crush their opponents, and that our favorite wineries crush our favorite grapes.

Although we’ve all heard the wine term “crush” before, it seems some folks are still a little unclear as to exactly what that means.

Generally, wine makers will refer to late Summer and most of Fall as “Crush Season”. But if you are a grape grower, to you, this is “Harvest Season.” The act of crushing is mainly done with red grapes these days. What happens is the grapes clusters are harvested, then taken to the winery. There they are put into a machine that does two things at once: destemming and crushing. The wine industry, in an attempt to confuse people, though, calls this machine the destemer/crusher.

This efficient, technological wonder quickly removes the grapes from the stems. The grapes then pass through soft rubber rollers that gently break their skins to release the juice into a fermenter. The stems are typically discarded. Yeast is then added to the fermenter where it eats the sugar in the juice and converts it into alcohol. Keep in mind the skins of the grapes are still in the fermenter to give red wine its color because almost all grape juice is clear.

After the yeast converts all the sugar to alcohol, the juice is put into barrels. However, about 20% of the juice is still attached to the skins. Winemakers, being a greedy bunch, will press this juice out of the skins using another machine. That device is known by industry insiders as the “press”. White grapes usually go straight to the press after harvest. Their skins aren’t needed, so the juice is pressed directly into barrels or tanks for fermentation.

In the old days, grapes were crushed by foot. The foot is an excellent crusher because it is heavy enough to break the skins, but soft enough not to break the grape seeds. If you break too many seeds, the wine will be very bitter. Kinda like the rivalry between Georgia Tech and Cumberland College, or Lucy and the Italian woman in the grape vat.

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