It is essential to have clean feet

T S. ELIOT used to say April is the cruellest month. It is a time of nervous tension and almost constant prayer. The wise man never believes anything until the grapes are bubbling in the fermenter. One year Len Evans was particularly happy with his vintage. He reported in Saturday's Australian newspaper that the grapes were perfect. This could be the greatest year in the Hunter Valley. They were picking on Monday.

Come the Sunday, with exquisite timing, there was the cyclone that produced twelve inches of rain in 24 hours. Rarely had they seen such a tremendous downpour. All Len could do was sit on his verandah and weep as he watched $100,000 being washed away.

The time is unnerving, but then it is beautiful. How exciting it is to watch nature in action. Come late February We have veraison. Veraison has a noble mellifluous sound. The French say it with a lovely growl that comes from the back of the throat.

Veraison is that stage when the grapes have reached their maximum size, the stage before full ripeness. Veraison is when the grapes go through their chameleon act and change from pale green to red.

When veraison sets in, the bunches are filling out and it is part of the magic of nature watching them turn deep purple. You think that in the grand viticultural obstacle race you are almost there.

But, of course you are not. This is the viticultural game of snakes and ladders. As soon as the grapes change colour the nets must go on. This is another thing set to try good humour. The nets are wonderful for keeping the birds away, but they stop every other activity. One can only get into the vineyard by crawling on one's hands and knees. It is impossible to mow the grass and impossible to spray. So in cruel April we go out every morning, looking for mould, looking for rot, looking for tell-tale stains on the leaves.

"Oh God, please keep it all away until vintage." This is a delicate matter. It is presumptuous for a mere male, but vintage is like being pregnant. There is the same tension, the same awful feeling of suspense and worry. The experts tell with authority the day it will happen, but it never works. The appointed date passes, you become increasingly uncomfortable, suffer terrible dreams, and there is the constant terror, will the baby be all right?

Grape harvest is unconscionably long, almost like the football season. Vineyards up on the Hunter River start picking way back in early February. In North Eastern Victoria and the Barossa Valley it is early March. As we proceed south it gets later and later. In lofty areas of the Mornington Peninsula and Tasmania anything can happen. The dinkum nail biters and perspirers are the growers of cabernet sauvignon. Those damned little berries are the last of the ripeners. Sometimes they hang on right until June. When that happens the growers are praying, burning candles, buying fortune cookies, it is very cruel.

Under normal lovely copy book conditions it is easy. Once a week, say on Tuesdays, we go round the vineyard and pick 170 individual berries. They must come from all over, the sunny side of the vines, the shady side, high up and low down. Then we come back, put them in the stainless steel saucepan, crush them with the potato masher and push the juice through the wire strainer. We check the sugar content with a hydrometer and every Tuesday the reading is expected to rise in a pertect graph so theoretically you can gauge the exact day labour pains will begin. Oh but it doesn't, it slips back with rain, lack of sunshine, cool nights, humidity.

Are you still there? Can I tell you how it gets worse. In big fancy vineyards they have mechanical harvesters. They are terrifying machines about twice the size of mechanical garbage trucks. They move out at 2 am, to get the grapes when they are nice and cool, then they beat or shake the bejabbers out of their vines to gather the berries. Little vineyards can't afford such stuff. They have to pick in the heat of the day and depend on no-cost labour. There's a tradition that goes back to the dawn of cabernet. You line up your friends, tell them to keep April 13 absolutely free, promise them a damned good lunch with unlimited quantities of the product to imbibe, and lo, all your grapes get picked.

But don't you see? On April 13 the sugar is not right. If we induce the baby at this stage, the wine will be horrid, thin, pale and acid. So we ring around, "Hey Tom, Hey Isabel, Hey Charlie and Hannah, it's all off, you wouldn't possibly be free next week ...by any chance???"

"So there is another unnerving week, waiting, looking out the window, watching clouds. One listens to all the cheery chats about the weather with Ranald and Doug and Elaine. Please, please, give us some warmth this week. It rains all day Tuesday, the sugar reading doesn't move and we are set back another week.

"Tom and Isabel, would you mind.….?" Now your best pickers suddenly have appointments to play golf at Barwon Heads, or are off on a Women's Weekly tour of Paris and Amsterdam. I tell you, after all these changes you have to promise a lunch better than Mietta's, Stephanie's and Two Faces all rolled into one. But as the gestation period extends the grapes ripen more and more slowly, bunches start to collapse they begin to turn white and mouldy with botrytis. It is a sheer question of nerve and holding on. Some say that four times out of five grapes are picked too early, a week or two before they reach their maximum flavour. Flavour versus disease, that is the lottery. Oh dear, being a mother is awful.

Ultimately the baby is born and, of course, the much-put-off pickers are incredibly faithful. It would be impossible to over estimate the feeling of relief and euphoria. Nothing equals the joy of watching the flow of train loads of grapes heading towards the winery. There is an infectious feeling about a harvest and bringing in the fruit. It always affects the grape pickers. Some go about it with all the intensity of stock brokers when the market dollar is sinking. Others talk, unbear their souls, tell the stories of previous husbands and wives, recant the behaviour of their 17-year-olds or why their marmalade won't set.

Old hands in the business give solid rules of thumb on how to handle free pickers.

1. Tell them the starting time is two hours earlier than the actual moment you expect to get going. This way you will have at least six pickers at 9 am.

2. First class equipment, squadrons of buckets, secateurs, Band Aids etc. Don't make the secateurs or grape scissors too sharp. You will find that grape           pickers sometimes don't see all that well, and fingers can be snipped just like grapes. Good winemakers prefer not to have blood in the wine. The older pickers     don't like carrying heavy buckets. Have young muscle to fetch and carry.

3. Give them tea or soup breaks at 11 am and 12.30 pm. Never, never, never give them food or wine until all the grapes are picked. It doesn't matter if you         don't serve lunch until 5 o'clock, nobody has ever succeeded in getting free pickers back to work again, once the corks are pulled. Watch out for the pickers       who just come for the lunch. There is a sliding scale, a sort of law of motion. For example a keen picker should fill at least 40 buckets of grapes. If you get     two bottles to the bucket and he/she drinks one bottle at lunch you have an 80 plus picker. If they arrive at 10 am you have a 40 plus picker. Ah, but then you     have the true Bacchanalian fun-loving pickers, they might arrive at 1 pm and pick only one bucket. They move on to the minus side of the scale, and they are       drinking two bottles of wine for each bucket.

4. Suggest to the pickers, say around 4 pm, would they care to help with the heavy labour of heaving the grapes into the grape crusher and plunging the must in     the fermenter. We need some ardent volunteers to keep working through the night. If you don't do this, your ardent pickers who worked so nobly through the         morning might go through your whole cellar. 

We have found all this excellent advice. But vintage day, while full of joy like days when a baby is born, can be unnerving. There is the worry whether the juice has enough colour and flavour. There is the worry about the sugar. One might take samples in the vineyard on Thursday to discover a baume of 13.5 sugar, but when it is in the vat mysteriously it has sunk to 12.5 or 11.8. Grapes in different parts of the vineyard can have different sugar levels.

After the pickers have gone home the real work begins. All the grapes have to be put through the crusher de-stemmer. Our wine advisors, Nat and Rosalie White, went 35 hours non stop with the crushing of their 1993 chardonnay. They did not finish until 11 am the following day.

Some say 90 per cent of the skill in producing good wine is in the vineyard. If you don't have perfect grapes you will never make good wine. Others put the skills differently, maybe it is 60/40 or even 50/50. They talk a great deal about the wonders of alchemy in the winery. Sometimes, however, in moments of agony one is more inclined to think that winemaking is 10 per cent chemistry and 90 per cent washing up. Washing up after any party cannot be compared with having to wash stainless steel tanks, grape crushers and 200 buckets left behind by the pickers.

It is lovely when all the juice and the skins go into the fermenter. The aroma is so rich and heady it flows all the way down to the house. You can taste the fresh juice, it is so rich and luscious, terrible heretical thoughts come to mind. Why ever let those sugars convert into alcohol? Well, keep going back and back to the fermenter. Happiness is a full vat. The skins form a rich cake on top so that the stainless steel fermenter looks as if it is holding the world's biggest Christmas pudding. The skins have to be pushed down into the juice every six to eight hours. This is called plunging. But there is no let up. I have a plunger which is a tent pole fixed into a round hunk of oak and ten minutes with this is better than half an hour in the gym.

It all brings back memories. How similar it to those days when babies started to howl at 2 am. Nappies had to be changed. The dreadful chauvinist male looked upon this as female work. Someone had to get out of the warm bed and do the job. Marie never said: "It's your turn this time, dear." Now at 2 am the situation is in reverse. I am looking after the pinot baby. There is a marvellous temptation to say: "It's your turn dear."

It can be strange in the winery at 2 am. Kathleen Quealy, an excellent winemaker, gave warning: "Open all the doors and let in the air. There is so much carbon dioxide coming up from those grapes, you can die. Honestly. It has happened. You can keel over into the vat and nobody would be there to rescue you. " So while plunging I would think of the story in the paper next day.

WINEMAKER DEAD

I think it was on the third day of plunging, that I washed the plunger under the tap at the tank outside, went to look at my watch with the torch…one becomes very conscious of the time at 2 am. That's extraordinary. It wasn't there. It was a gold Omega watch given to me by the Herald & Weekly Times Ltd. It was beautifully inscribed on the back. It had been a cranky watch which never went very well, but it had great senti- mental value.

I searched around all the benches, I crawled under the racks of barrels, looked all round the fermenters. Slowly the terrible thought came to mind. There is only one place it could be. It must have slipped off my wrist while I was doing that vigorous plunging. It had to be in the fermenter under 1000 litres of red must.

I stretched down into red juice, the skins went right up to the arm pit but my arm was not long enough. I scraped all through the tank with a plunger, no result, it was gone. I returned to the house and reported glumly: "I think Ihave lost my gold watch. It is somewhere in the big fermenting tank. Down at the bottom."

After more than 40 years of married life Marie is used to amazing statements like this. "You had better hunt till you find it."

"How can I? The only way to do it would be to drain the tank and I won't be doing that for at least two weeks. I have tried everything. I've gone right over it with the plunger." "Well," she said wisely. "Get a stainless steel pole and start tapping. If there is metal against metal you might hear something."

So back I went. I took a stainless steel pole. The RAF used to have this advice for young pilots when lost. Do a square search. Take a landmark then fly in ever expanding squares around that mark until you find something that is familiar. I picked a spot in the middle of the tank and started my RAAF square search, tap, tap, tap…. After three quarters of an hour of tapping I heard a clink. My God! That was it.

I had to stretch down, head in must, until I managed to grab the gold Omega. I pulled it to the surface. In the specifications Omega had never mentioned that it was waterproof, but incredibly the watch was still going. But better than that, the watch which heretofore had been cranky, irritable, prone to frequent stopping periods, operated perfectly from then on.

Obviously a pinot noir bath was all it required. Yes, the early days or birth are trying for parents. The must is up there gently bubbling in the fermenter and every six hours it is essential to give a vigorous pounding with a paddle. But there is more to it than that. For many centuries the French have done it with their feet. Anthony Hanson in his famous book 'Burgundy' writes; "Some proprietors, even those with oenological degrees and modern installations, remain convinced that human bodies play an important part in successful vinification.

So they get into the must and pound it all, either with their bare feet or gumboots, clinging to the side of the vat as they pound. The age old word for this is 'pigeage. There is a danger, according to Hanson, that portions of the must will start fermenting too fast, so only a swimming man can discover the overheated pockets and churn them back into the mass. He reveals further that a century ago there was truth in the saying that this really was the vignerons annual bath. But he was careful to add that in modern France absolute cleanliness was maintained.

In Australia for decades now we have tried to produce pinots akin to the great pinots made in Burgundy, but as mentioned earlier, too often they have been thin and lacking in flavour. More and more Australians have been resorting to Burgundian methods and some have even been brave enough to try the pigeage. Our son David became fascinated by the activities of the Victorian winemaker, Gary Farr, who has consistently made some of Victoria's finest pint at Bannockburn 25 kilometres from Geelong.

Farr is a devoted admirer of Burgundian methods. Indeed he is so close to the French that he actually works two vintages

I searched around all the benches, I crawled under the racks of barrels, looked all round the fermenters. Slowly the terrible thought came to mind. There is only one place it could be. It must have slipped off my wrist while I was doing that vigorous plunging. It had to be in the fermenter under 1000 lites of red must.

I stretched down into red juice, the skins went right up to the arm pit but my arm was not long enough. I scraped all through the tank with a plunger, no result, it was gone. I returned to the house and reported glumly: "I think I have lost my gold watch. It is somewhere in the big fermenting tank. Down at the bottom."

After more than 40 years of married life Marie is used to amazing statements like this. " You had better hunt till you find it." "How can I? The only way to do it would be to drain the tank and I won't be doing that for at least two weeks. I have tried everything. I've gone right over it with the plunger." "Well," she said wisely. "Get a stainless steel pole and start tapping. If there is metal against metal you might hear something."

So back I went. I took a stainless steel pole. The RAF used to have this advice for young pilots when lost. Do a square search. Take a landmark then fly in ever expanding squares around that mark until you find something that is familiar. I picked a spot in the middle of the tank and started my RAAF square search, tap, tap,tap…. After three quarters of an hour of tapping I heard a clink. My God! That was it.

I had to stretch down, head in must, until I managed to grab the gold Omega. I pulled it to the surface. In the specifications Omega had never mentioned that it was waterproof, but incredibly the watch was still going. But better than that, the watch which heretofore had been cranky, irritable, prone to frequent stopping periods, operated perfectly from then on.

Obviously a pinot noir bath was all it required. Yes, the early days or birth are trying for parents. The must is up there gently bubbling in the fermenter and every six hours it is essential to give a vigorous pounding with a paddle. But there is more to it than that. For many centuries the French have done it with their feet. Anthony Hanson in his famous book 'Burgundy' writes;

"Some proprietors, even those with oenological degrees and modern installations, remain convinced that human bodies play an important part in successful vinification."

So they get into the must and pound it all, either with their bare feet or gumboots, clinging to the side of the vat as they pound. The age old word for this is 'pigeage. There is a danger, according to Hanson, that portions of the must will start fermenting too fast, so only a swimming man can discover the overheated pockets and churn them back into the mass. He reveals further that a century ago there was truth in the saying that this really was the vignerons annual bath. But he was careful to add that in modern France absolute cleanliness was maintained.

In Australia for decades now we have tried to produce pinots akin to the great pinots made in Burgundy, but as mentioned earlier, too often they have been thin and lacking in flavour. More and more Australians have been resorting to Burgundian methods and some have even been brave enough to try the pigeage. Our son David became fascinated by the activities of the Victorian winemaker, Gary Farr, who has consistently made some of Victoria's finest pinot at Bannockburn 25 kilometres from Geelong.

Farr is a devoted admirer of Burgundian methods. Indeed he is so close to the French that he actually works two vintages a year, one at Bannockburn and another at the famous Domaine Dujac in Burgundy. Regularly he goes all the way with pigeage at both vineyards. One time at Domaine Duja, under the careful eye of the proprietor, Jacques Seysses, he demonstrated the human pigeage for a visiting television crew. Our local guide and mentor, Nat White at Main Ridge Estate is another who goes for pigeage. There is a legendary story that one night he was foot tramping in his pinot. We beg you to understand that a quality pigeage should really be done in the suit that God gave you. All right, inadvertently he left his underpants on the side of the vat. Next day some cellar door sales customers noted this garment and asked what had been going on. Nat tried to explain his classic pigeage methods. The customers were horrified. "Your feet in the wine? We're not buying any of that stuff."

Nat's method is to first put 30 per cent whole grapes into the fermenter. The other 70 per cent is crushed grapes and their skins. He puts a yeast starter on top and leaves it there, no plunging for the first few days. This slows the fermentation, which begins gently from the surface down. The theory is that this will add to the colour and complexity of the wine. On the fourth day he is plunging to a third of a metre, and by the fifth he is getting in there and squashing the whole bunches at the bottom with his feet.

David's enthusiasm for pigeage became even greater when he spotted photographs in Hugh Johnson's "World Atlas of Wine." This showed three naked men all in together, foot stamping. The World Atlas was written in 1970 and Johnson suggested then that this had been replaced by modern technology. Well, so it has in the vast wineries run by Lindemans, Penfolds, Yalumba and the like. They have machines to churn the must and, besides, it would be death to get into one of their vats. One would be either drowned or suffocated by carbon dioxide. Ah, but in small boutique wineries where the fermenters are small everything is possible. If they are not bath size, at least they are mini swimming pools.

"#T"We must do this," said David. "It is essential." So on the fourth day, as recommended by Nat White, David got into the fermenters. He was not like the old French vignerons. First he had a shower, went to the winery in his dressing gown and then plunged in. He found it a joyous, even euphoric experience.

He passed some facetious comment. What would this mean for wine criticism? In the future wine assessments would go like this: "An effete little juice, the '93, probably Caucasian tramping, male, aged 42, and judging by the texture, an academic or clerical worker of some sort. Bigger feet would be an advantage."

The feminists too, he thought, would move in. Regardless of the ancient stories of foot tramping by virgins, pigeage these past 100 years has been an all male affair.

The next night it was my turn. I had my shower, put on the towelling dressing gown I usually wear to the beach, and went to the winery. One tends to be a little shy and sensitive in these matters. Pigeage is best done late at night for one does not want sudden intrusion from visitors. Furthermore, as Nat discovered, cellar door sales people are easily shocked. On the fourth day, as it should, our pinot was edging up to 30 degrees Celsius. There was a thick mat of skins on top, juice underneath and bunches way below. It was all delectably warm and incredibly sensuous. Squelch, squelch, squelch. We have three fermenting vats, one time stainless steel milk tanks. Two hold 1000 litres each, the third taller and much deeper with 1400 litres.

It was nice, one did not want to get out. I paddled with my feet and pushed down great globs of skins with my hands. A swim in the first vat, a swim in the second, then I had to climb a ladder to get into the third. Now the must, skins and juice, was up around my chest. My God! How would I get out? Once again there were thoughts of the hereafter. After the body was found there would be a sort of running joke. Naked body found in the wine vat. What a lovely death it must have been, immersed in warm pinot noir. The vicar when saying his little piece at the funeral would run on no end. All his life wine was an obsession. Was it not fitting, oh Lord, that he should end in this way? Perhaps the vicar could even use it as a cautionary tale about the evils of alcohol.

Eventually I found a little steel projection in the tank. Originally it was used to hold a measure to check on the quantity of milk in the tank. I put a foot on this, and very red and rather sticky, heaved myself out, put on a dressing gown and headed for the bathroom.

In all the literature about pigeage, one thing is not mentioned. The wine is left on the skins to extract colour, it comes from what the experts call phenolic compounds, quite a powerful dye, hard to remove. You will notice this the next time you spill a glass of red on your white carpet or pale slacks. After skins tended to form an impenetrable layer on the surface. It was too hard to push them down with the plunger, so I used hands as well as feet. The result? During vintage - hands go the colour of mahogany.

And of course, at this time of trauma, prayer is particularly important. It is clear from the Bible that God has always been on the side of winemaking. The first year I did this I went to Communion, cupped my hands to take the wafer. There they were, dark mahogany. The vicar said nothing during this sacred moment, but one suspected he was deliberating: "Wouldn't you think he'd wash his hands before he came to church?"

There is little possibility that the hands will turn pale again for several weeks. When the fermentation is complete the free run juice is pumped off into oak barrels and the skins are pressed for the extra rich, exotic juice. The big wineries have sophisticated presses which cost anything up to $300,000. Little vineyards like ours, which are strictly 19th century, have hand cranked basket presses.

You will have seen them on labels or in old German and French woodcuts. The design has not changed in 200 years. The skins are put in a wooden cage like a basket, massive blocks of wood sit on this red mulch, there is a screw, a ratchet, and a long iron bar to be pushed back and forth.

As soon as the great squeeze takes effect, the pushing of that iron bar becomes harder and harder. Those who have worked the bar on a basket press have all come to the same conclusion. The work would be very similar to that done by galley slaves in the Mediterranean, circa 150 AD. It goes better too if the winemaker in charge has the personality of a Roman Centurion with a whip. But it's amazing how much juice comes out of those skins. This is the pressings and many a wine owes its glory to the muscles of the galley slaves under their Centurion.

Finally when you take the skins out of the press they are squashed into a perfect cake. It looks exactly like the most wonderful Christmas cake you ever saw. We break up the cake, spread it round the roses and the aroma pervades the entire garden. That day the free range chooks move in. They think it is heaven and the yokes of their eggs look as rich as a Japanese sunset.

Work does not stop there. In recent times malolactic fermentation has been all the go. Wine is composed of a number of acids, tartaric, lactic and malic. It has become fashionable to take out the malic acid to gain a softer, rounder wine. This is done by introducing an enzyme, prepared beforehand in fresh wine or apple juice. It is known as "doing the malo", and it can be a most contrary business. Sometimes it goes through smoothly and brilliantly in the space of a week, or it can take three months, or maybe, cussedly, refuse to take place at all.

Whatever happens, the wine needs to be warm and comfortable. Some winemakers cover their vats with the aluminium foil used by builders and put electric heaters underneath. Some have been known to use immersion heaters, pushed into the vats, the sort of things used at aquariums for tropical fish.

At our place regularly we have used electric blankets. One desperate year I took the electric blankets off every bed in the house, including the big one off the double bed. That was ideal for keeping warm a happy trio of three barrels. Daily I would go to the winery, take the temperature of the wine to make sure the malo was happy.

Again one needs a very secure marriage and an under- standing wife like Marie to get away with this sort of thing. But it goes further than that. To check whether the malo is going through one has to make tests with drops of wine placed on chromotography paper. Each one of the drops has to be dried first with a hair dryer. So almost every day the family hair dryer goes up to the winery.

Marie complains that everything in the kitchen is stolen regularly for the winery - saucepans, measuring jars, paper towels, kitchen scales, scissors, scourers.. It is a splendid test for that line in the marriage vows about sharing all worldly goods.

But eventually the wine settles down and quietly sits there in the barrels for a year. Every week it is important to do the rounds and top them up. The evaporation rate per barrel in summer is at least a bottle a week. We always accuse God of taking the wine. There is no doubt, he is incredibly thirsty.

Follow onto the next chapter, Bottling the demon