Скачать или смотреть Picking Pinot Noir in California: Harvest Day at the Scherrer Winery

It's harvest day for Pinot Noir in the Russian River Valley! Fred Scherrer of the Scherrer Winery in Sonoma County, California walks us through his day, from a very early, pre-dawn alarm clock, all the way through bringing grapes into the winery and processing them.

We joined Fred Scherrer for the 2013 harvest at the Gunsalus Vineyard in the Russian River Valley.

Filmed with Fred Scherrer at the winery in California and City Winery Chicago.

See all of our videos with Fred Scherrer:    • Fred Scherrer, The Scherrer Winery, Sebast...  

Watch our videos from harvest 2013:    • Scherrer Winery: Harvest 2013  

Ask your question on Twitter: www.twitter.com/askawinemaker @askawinemaker.

When we picked the Gunsalus Pinot Noir it was very early in the harvest so I didn't have a lot of other fermentations to attend to. But the day would start off with the alarm clock going off with me looking up in disbelief that sleeping time was so short. I get up how some coffee, drive to the winery, check any fermentations it might be in place just make sure that they're doing what they ought to be doing, and if we're headed out to Gunsalus vineyard I make sure that the bins that on my truck or trailer are tied down that everything is appropriate to have some more coffee and then wait for the people other people are coming to assemble to go out and harvest the grapes in it get everything set up so that we can go out there as soon as it's light to be able to start picking grapes because we would really like to get them in before they heat up very much. There are many places that harvest at night and in this particular instance we don't but there are other places at night you might start instead of it at first light which might be six o'clock in the morning six to 630 that time of year if they may start harvesting at two in the morning or even one in the morning. So in the morning, the picking crew actually showed up at the winery so that we could all go in a caravan to the vineyard. It's a small vineyard that's difficult to find and since the harvesting crew it doesn't normally work at that vineyard we pretty much guided them to the vineyard so we met in the dark everybody showed up we crammed as many people into as few cars as possible and caravan to over there. I follow it along with my pickup and my trailer and bins we about everybody out there to harvest and they got oriented did their morning stretches etc, then went to work in the meantime then I back my trader into this tiny space, got it backed up in an appropriate spot so that we could dump the grapes into the larger bins that I bring to the winery. So then we ferried the grapes on a small ATV back and forth in small lug boxes so that we could then transfer them to the bins that I actually take to the winery. That's my morning exercise! The guidelines we follow are to pick the right fruit and to not pick leaves and if leaves do fall into the picking pans to remove them. And actually, remove them as soon as they fall because some of these leaves are still green and pliable, some of them are yellowing and beginning to senesce or finish their lifecycle and some of them actually have somewhat dried and were kind of crunchy dry. If believes those fall onto the mass of grapes that are in the picking pan and you throw other grapes on top of them they end up crunching them up in little pieces and you've got these tiny little dusty pieces of grape or grape leaves that are very difficult if not impossible to remove so you get enough of that into their it actually can bring kind of a tea-like element to the Pinot Noir. And since Pinot Noir is so transparent to everything that's in it it isn't Pinot Noir that may not be something you want to have in there. And one of the other important things took to look out for, is well any of the grapes you don't want to get in there that could be under-ripe grapes it may possibly still be hanging out there; rotten grapes in many vintages that are really significant, and others it's much less significant and possibly sunburn fruit that's over-exposed and harvested during or after a very uncharacteristically hot period. So all those are what the harvesters are looking for and it's amazing how fast they can move and actually accomplish this all at once.

We actually left the end vines to ripen for a few more days because the end vines for some reason tend to ripen after the ones in the middle there's less competition in the root zone perhaps, I'm sure there is. That's, I think the reason that the end vines ripen up a little bit later, and in this case since we're ripening kind of on the earlier side of my strike zone for Pinot Noir, I don't want to have grapes here outside of that so we left them on the vines for a few more days it came back and actually the vineyard owners themselves harvested those vines and brought them to me.