The Pleiades

When the wine is fermenting, Tom leaves the house before the crack of early. I try to tag along when I can get up that early (we're talking out the door by 5:45 AM).

On the short way to the car, I've seen some amazing stars. I think I've even seen the Pleiades. I'm not sure. It's early. And it's lovely.

Then I hang out at the shop while Tom measures things and punches down the cap on the Merlot.

This morning, I managed to remember my camera.

Barrels of the Sauvingon Blanc we crushed and pressed the first weekend.

Barrels of Chardonnay that we crushed and pressed on Sunday.

Merlot from the first crush fermenting. The skins rise to the top and form a hard cap. That's what gets punched down.

The Merlot cap up close.

The smell is wonderful, too. But it's a long day. And Tom just called to say that he's pressing Merlot and won't be home for a while.

Now we await the Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc.

Crush and gratitude

Yesterday, we crushed a ton of Sauvignon Blanc grapes and a ton and a half of Merlot grapes. This volume was made possible by a raft of friends helping out and by the Big Dog, which is what I'm calling our new destemmer-crusher.

Doesn't it look sleek? Wait until we turn it on!

The garden statue yard next door...

Many hands sorting Sauvignon Blanc grapes...

Pressing the Sauvignon Blanc...

See how it runs...

Merlot coming through...

Most of wine-making is cleaning. A lot of cleaning. And I'm really grateful for the help with that!

I'm grateful for all the help with crush. I'm grateful we have the opportunity to do this. I'm grateful that it didn't rain much. I'm really grateful for the Big Dog, which made the day run much more smoothly (and we got home before dark).

I'm grateful for the sunny day we had on Saturday, and a poem acceptance.

Back a bit, I'm grateful for the Day of Caring on Friday, and the people at Hope for Horses who rescue abused and neglected horses. I'm grateful for Josie, the one-eyed horse who, after everything she's been through, likes to have her belly scratched.

I'm grateful for a moment of quiet so I can share all this with you. Open the door. Open my heart.

I'm sensing a theme

Racking the Cabernet Sauvignon that we pressed yesterday into a barrel.

Getting a little more wine out of the tank, very carefully.

Topping off the barrel.

Two full barrels = heavy.

The wand in a bin of Cabernet Franc.

The pump is on, and the level is going down...

and down...

...and the tank is filling up.

This is looking a lot like yesterday.

Jamie wants to press out the last drop.

It's looking a little surreal.

Grape cake.

Pressed

Yesterday, we pressed Cabernet Sauvignon. Tom had already started when I arrived with the requested additional containers for the surplus wine.

Wine making involves a lot of cleaning.

Cranking the press.

The pressed grapes glisten through the basket slats.

Pressed juice rushing into the bucket.

A beautiful grape cake. It looks almost like some richly embroidered fabric.

A good shot of the grape cake.

The next step was to dig into that cake and load it all into bags for later composting. It's fun to break off big chunks and try to load them without spilling skins all over the ground (messy). And, that mass is warm. After our second press, I was doing this in the dark, I had cold water inside my gloves, and my feet were numb. I really looked forward to getting into the warm center of that mass of grape skins.

Catching up

Busy doings chez nous. Tom has been leaving early and staying late to punch down the wine. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, I made it out of the house with him.

Yes, this is in the morning.

Carbon dioxide escapes as part of the fermentation process, and bubbles up. (Sorry you can't see the bubbling action.)

Two barrels of fermenting Chardonnay.

One big bucket of fermenting Chardonnay. It has just started (and it doesn't look like wine, but it does look like fermentation).

Using the high-tech setup to pull out some Merlot for brix measurements.

Measuring the brix.

The next day, that Chardonnay is really cooking. And the shop does smell like bread rising. It's all about the yeast (for now).

This past Saturday, we crushed two more tons of grapes, a ton of Cabernet Franc and a ton of Cabernet Sauvignon. The grapes were pretty, and pretty sticky, and we were all pretty tired by the end of it. I don't have pictures because I was putting all my energy into getting it done. But maybe tomorrow I can make it to that early morning punch-down.

Crushed

A ton of Merlot grapes looks like this. That was Saturday's work.

On Sunday, we tackled half a ton of Chardonnay.

Jamie feeding the crusher.

Chardonnay juice pouring out of the press.

Need a couple new blocks for the press? Having a woodshop right there is handy, especially when the winemaker knows how to use the tools.

Grape cake.

Big Basin #1 is almost full.

The new door

The door on the right, newly crafted and hung, leads to the barrel room. (The close-up photos didn't come out, but it is a very fine portal.)

In the barrel room

Yesterday, on our way to wine tastings a couple of wineries in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle, we stopped by the shop to check on the wine. When Tom pulled out the bungs, we could hear the wine crackling with malolactic fermentation.

I've spent the most part of four glorious days working on poems. I started by going through every poem in my manuscript (the one I wasn't going to revise for a while). Then I went through my most recent copy of Poets & Writers and some of the submission call information on Facebook and gathered all the links.

Now, I'm going through the poems in my "list of poems that are available to send," and some of them I'm sending to the barrel room. Looking at them through my time-has-passed and post-Lorna-Dee-Cervantes-workshop lenses, I can tell that they need work—and if I don't know quite what that work is, if I try a few or a lot of things and the poem still isn't working, it just needs more time to age. (It might be a lot more time. Some of those poems might never get bottled—but that's okay, and I'll probably learn something along the way.)

And now, for your submitting pleasure, here is my list:

Bryant Literary Review
http://bryant1.bryant.edu/~blr/2008.htm

Hanging Moss Journal
http://www.hangingmossjournal.com/submissions/

Mary Magazine
http://www.stmarys-ca.edu/external/Mary/submissions.html

Natural Bridge
http://www.umsl.edu/~natural/guidelines/guidelines.html

The Normal School
http://www.thenormalschool.com/guidelines.html

Paddlefish
http://www.mmcpaddlefish.com/submit.html

The Pedestal Magazine
http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/submitguidelines.php

Third Wednesday
http://www.thirdwednesday.org/submissions.php

And the wineries we visited?

Nota Bene
http://www.notabenecellars.com/pages/first.html

O-S
http://www.oswinery.com/

A good day

Today, we crushed half a ton of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes.

What does this have to do with writing?

Nothing, except that I was able to do a little writing beforehand, and then (after a quick trip to the gym) devote the rest of the day to crush.

What a mess!

There we were in a parking lot in Georgetown bent way down into bins and picking leaves (and bugs!) off the grapes or, after they went through the crusher and mostly destemmer, picking out the rest of the stems. For hours. (We did take a quick break for chicken, provolone, and prosciutto sandwiches with, naturally, wine.)

I was going to take pictures, but I became immediately much too sticky to touch anything. (Imagine your hands in a swamp of grape berries and juice.)

And everyone got to take a turn at pushing the button on the crusher-destemmer. (No feet were involved in the making of this wine.)

Merlot is in the barrel, Cabernet Sauvignon is cold soaking, and Cabernet Franc is still on the vine. More fun to come, and then two years to wait.

All this creativity, and the mess and the must and anticipation of fermentation surely is a metaphor for poetry—but right now, I'm too tired to dip into the details.

Red, red wine

I spent the weekend in the Sonoma and Napa valleys California, tagging along with my husband to wineries. We went on tours and asked questions, and I learned more about the process of making wine—especially red wine: the pump-over, and the racking, and the fining (no one ever wants to tell you much about that), the fermentation processes and yeast and barrels and temperature and most definitely aging.

Any wine maker has his or her own little tricks and variations, but the basic idea is the same: certain processes need to be done at certain times so that the grapes you crush become the wine that you want to enjoy.

I've heard people talk about putting your poems in a drawer for—oh, say, two years. I've never been good at that. When I think a poem is ready, after x number of revisions and comments from a poet friend or my poetry group, I'm ready to try it out on the real world.

What if I put it in a barrel for 18 months or a couple of years? What if I revisited it at periodic intervals and tried different things—give the poem, or myself, time to mature?

What's the rush? (That opens its own barrel of questions.)

Maybe it's time I become more patient, build the barrel time into my work.

What about you? Do you hold onto your poems, even after many revisions, and give them time to rest—or give yourself time to gain some new perspectives that you can bring to them?