Winemaking puts new twist on the harvest

Tastes of our Cape

We don't often think about it this way but wine — like peaches, asparagus, and tomatoes — is an agricultural product.

The grape crop has its good years and its bad years around the world, which is why vintage and place truly matter when it comes to wine.

Weather varies from year to year, giving some vintages (2003, say, from Bordeaux) a notoriously "hot" quality because 2003 was the summer in France where many people (not to mention grapes) wilted and died from the scorching heat.

Though there's lots to be done within the winery to keep a wine brand consistent - adding sugars, for example, or certain types of acids — the more authentic winemakers and brands will allow the wine to speak for itself, to speak of its hot summer or wet spring, to speak of a change in irrigation practice or an increase in the amount of green harvesting that's been done.

The point is that, right now — heading into September all across the northern hemisphere and right here in Massachusetts — winemakers are prowling their vineyards, tasting skins, pulp and seeds as they go, determining the grapes' level of readiness for picking. Patience is key, as winemakers wait until the grapes reach their ripest hour before giving the call to harvest.

When that happens, pickers will descend on the vineyards. In Napa, for example, crews of pickers will move at alarming speed with sharper-than-razor knife blades shaped like a sickle to efficiently snip the grape bunches from the vine. They'll drop them into standard-size bins at their feet, bins that are sized so that they hold only a certain volume of grapes in order to minimize the crush and flow of juice before they make it into the winery's controlled environment.

The pickers then carry the bins, often balancing them on their heads, to a collection point from which a tractor pulls the bins into the winery where the making and aging of the wines takes place.

Closer to home, here in Massachusetts, the harvesting operation happens on a smaller scale. Wineries in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island are part of the Southeastern New England AVA, or American Viticultural Appellation, which demarcates distinct ecological growing areas for grapes.

Because the volume of grapes grown and harvested in Massachusetts is much smaller than that grown in, say, the Napa or Sonoma AVA, some wineries have developed relationships with certain growers in California from whom they purchase grapes (or, sometimes, the juice from pressed grapes) and have it trucked into their wineries here in Massachusetts where they make the wine to their own liking and specifications.

In Gloucester, the process happens on an even smaller scale. Gloucester has its own community of home winemakers whose most visible commonality, just like the Mondavis or the Beringers of California, is perhaps their Portuguese or Italian ancestry, where winemaking for consumption at home was simply a matter of course.

Whereas they had vineyards closer to hand, home winemakers in Gloucester participate in a sort of harvest-time cottage industry that sprouts up, allowing them to purchase the tools of their trade like yeast, grapes, and bottles.

In some cases, home winemakers take their practice to the commercial level. At Running Brook winery on Cape Cod, for example, second-generation immigrants from Portugal hold the positions of grower, winemaker, and vineyard owner.

Some Gloucester residents also make their own wine at the Boston Winery, a facility in Dorchester that holds its annual Festa dell 'Uva, or festival of the grapes, each October. The Boston Winery sources premium grapes from the regions of California, including Sonoma, Contra Costa, Napa and Lodi.

The grapes — including cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and cabernet franc - are shipped to Boston and are then sorted into large red holding tanks that look like huge Le Creuset Dutch ovens, complete with lids ridged with concentric circles. Individual winemakers then care for their own lot, visiting the facility and stirring the "cap" of grape stems and skins, which is similar to the raft that forms from egg whites during the preparation of a consommé. Once the fermentation process is complete, the wine is bottled and is free to take home.

Making your own wine puts a new twist on the fall harvest, and on truly seeing the wine as the agricultural product that it is.

For those of us not inclined to make our own wine, recognizing the vineyard-to-bottle process at least gives a new appreciation of the vintages we see in the store.