Crush Hour: Harvest creates 'Super Bowl' time for growers, wineries
The annual crush season — bringing in and crushing the fruit to make wine — returned in late September and will continue most of October.
For instance, vehicle traffic is temporarily closed in Granary Square, but the place is all the busier for it.
“Super Bowl busy,” that is.
The parking area and thoroughfare off Lafayette Avenue and Fifth Street, next to Grain Station Brew Works, is open only to pedestrians as trucks and forklifts busily deliver grapes and transport them for crushing. Stacks of bins hold mounds of stems after grapes are removed.
“Things are happening fast and furious — it’s the Super Bowl of wine making, and we wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Susanne Sayles, director of marketing at R. Stuart & Co.
R. Stuart takes in grapes from 20 different vineyard partners, for its personal wines and custom crush. In the busy Granary District, between Oct. 1-5, a total of 108 tons of grapes are expected for processing which shares the square with several other wineries. The winery also contracts to make wines for other labels and next week will involve processing that fruit and beginning the fermentation, according to Sayles
During crush, they call it “Pinot Square,” and the first pinot juice started fermentation earlier this week. Yet Pinot grapes are just part of the action.
On the west side of the valley at Coeur de Terre Vineyard, picking will start soon; its location in the Coast Range foothills means “ripening happens a bit more slowly,” said Jim Maguire, direct sales manager. The vineyard and tasting room are located six miles west of McMinnville.
Near Carlton, the harvest is underway at Chris James Cellars, whose tasting room is in downtown McMinnville.
“The weather has been pretty good except for some rain in late September, but we got in the Pinot for rose before the rain, which is good,” said Beth Barnes, wife of winemaker Chris James Barnes.
This coming weekend they will be picking some other varieties, including Gamay and Sauvignon Blanc. Others will wait until later in October, giving the bigger reds more time on the vine, according to Barnes.
She wasn’t sure about the size of the harvest coming.
“Every year is different,” Barnes said.
Sparkling wines from the rose grapes picked this fall will be bottled and ready in about January 2025; whites are a pretty quick process, Barnes said. She said Chris James reds take longer, aging 18 months in barrels.
Sayles said the operation first focused on grapes for white wines, with as much as 25 tons of fruit arriving in a single day last week — Chardonnay and Pinot Gris grapes from two different vineyards
At R. Stuart, “Pinot started slow but is coming in hot and heavy,” Sayles said.
“They come in earlier than the Pinot Noir does. The main reason for that is we want to keep acid levels nice and high; make sure that everything is sitting well for white wine ferment,” she said.
Throughout the season, grapes come from as far north as Banks and south from the winery’s Daffodil Hill estate vineyard in the Eola Hills district.
The cellar staff of four and the winery’s other nine employees all keep busy with the receiving and pressing of grapes and the transfer of juice to totes for R. Stuart’s use, as well as other wineries they serve or cooperate with. This week the winery helped a local winemaker who recently had knee surgery and needed help with de-stemming his grapes.
Also helping with the crush are a rotating crew of “pilgrims” who come from far and wide to help process the grapes. These include an Atlanta grower whose wines are made at R. Stuart and a Vermont wine professional who yearly comes to McMinnville to help out, through love of wine-making. Another pilgrim is McMinnville native Levi Kimm, now living in Tillamook, who comes back to help each year.
“It’s very collaborative,” Sayles said, noting that the winery pressed juice for Lundeen Wines of McMinnville. Totes of juice will go to Lundeen, but in some cases wineries hire R. Stuart to press the juice and bottle their wines in-house, at Pinot Square.
“There have been really good spirits in the industry across the valley,” Sayles said. “Everyone has found a groove and are excited about the teamwork,” she said. “There’s less doom and gloom about weather, or fires. This is one of the more normal vintages we’re seen in awhile, which has been a breath of fresh air for vineyards in the valley.”
Harvest schedules are entirely up to winemaker’s decision, as most are looking not just at the scientific measure of brix, or sugar levels, but the actual taste profile of the grapes.
“The brix got there with the heat waves we got this summer but we are making sure the flavor is there,” she said.
The quality of grapes, including Pommard and Gamay, “has been gorgeous,” she said, pointing to “big clusters, dense with fruit, beautiful acid profiles.”
Next week, R. Stuart’s crew will largely focus on its single vineyard Pinot for its reserve wines. “We are letting those hang on the vines longer because we want that flavor,” she said, waiting for the green light from vineyard stewards.
“The next two weeks, we start doing double duty,” with pressing as well as fermentation off and Sayles said crush is “an exciting time, because it’s when we get to plan and learn,” with staff gaining ideas on what to bottle in the coming year.
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