Autumn in the vineyards:

It was 8:30 a.m. and the workers had
been at it for more than three hours,
moving from one row to the other,
picking clusters of rich, dark blue
grapes from the vines, knocking off
the stems, chucking them into white
bins.
It is the last step in one phase of
the winemaking process (growing the
grapes) and the fi rst step in the last
phase (making them into wine, in this
case, a merlot).
The workers in the Gundlach
Bundschu vineyards on this last Friday
in September work quickly but
with an obvious expertise. Few words
are spoken, which somehow matches
the quiet mood of the morning. It is
cloudy and breezy.
Overnight, autumn has come to Sonoma.
There is a somberness about
its arrival that seems to permeate the
Valley and as the workers move methodically
about their tasks, words
would seem somehow out of place.
The making of wine is inexorably
interwoven with man’s journey
through the ages. The Old Testament
of the Bible offers the fi rst record of
viniculture. Noah, it is written, planted
a vineyard and made wine.
Another story—perhaps apocryphal—
is that a long-ago Persian lady
of the court fell out of favor with the
king and attempted to poison herself
by eating table grapes that had spoiled
in a jar. Alas, she became intoxicated,
cites a history of wine Web site, “giddy
and fell asleep. When she awoke, she
found the stresses that had made her
life intolerable had dispersed.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
At Gundlach Bundschu the making
of wine has advanced a bit from fermenting
grapes in jars.
Workers fi ll 40-pound lugs with
grapes, which are transported by
tractor to the winery and dumped
into one-ton gondolas, which are then
weighed. Next, the fruit is dumped
into a hopper bin with a corkscrew in
the bottom of it. This all happens in
the heart of the 320-acre vineyard and
winery that in one form or the other
has been in Sonoma since 1858.
Linda Trotta, director of wine making,
stands on a ladder to watch as
the clusters of grapes tumble into the
crusher. With a large white plastic
rake, she moves through the grapes,
making sure stems are removed
and inferior grapes discarded. After
the skins, seeds, juice and pulp are
dropped out, the resulting mixture
– known as must – is pumped into fermentation
tanks.
Many stages are to follow, perhaps
the most intriguing of them coming
when Trotta will determine just how
much tannin the merlot will contain
and make other adjustments aimed at
producing wine with distinct characteristics
and superior quality. Up to 18
months later, the wine will have been
bottled and shipped out to retailers.
Earlier in September, the grapes
for the vineyard’s cabernet sauvignon
were picked, with results both
perplexing and good. Puzzling, said
Trotta, was the fact that the yield was
lower than she had expected. On the
plus side, she was quick to add, the
quality is the best she can remember
in her 18 years on the job.
Trotta speaks with great affection
about her career. She came to it
almost by accident. She was a math
major at UC Davis but quickly became
bored. She thumbed through the class
catalogue and discovered the wine
courses for which the university is renowned.
“I grew up with wine as a staple at
family meals,” said Trotta, a native of
Burbank. “It never occurred to me that
people made a living making wine.”
Laughing about this change of direction
at Davis, she added, it occurred
to her she had “drunk enough wine. I
probably should be OK at this.”
When talking about what she does,
Trotta quickly turned poetic. Looking
at the grapes below as the large screw
headed them toward their fi nal destination,
she said:
“This is what they grow up to do.
Everything has led to this moment.”