The Symptoms of Crush Time

Last night toward the end of an event a man approached me. He was speaking to me about the wine industry and how it was romantic or romanticized. As I stood there a few minutes before closing the bus, I found myself staring blankly at this strangers mouth as he spoke. I honestly have no clue what he was talking about.

Once at home I thought, you can romanticize wine. The deep reddish-purple hues, a softness like velvet on your palate, and that sexy feeling of swirling the perfect pour of wine in a beautiful crystal glass.

You can even romanticize the winemaking process. We used to keep a book by the fermentation tubs where people would write a bit about the punch down they’d just experienced. It’s difficult to describe the lusciousness of punching the now softened grape skins into the juice that is becoming wine in that very moment.

But this is not what he meant, he wasn’t that deep.

Perhaps he was saying that what is driving the wine industry growth rate is merely the romantic perspective of wine. If this case, this is an extremely simplified perspective that someone with poor timing brought to me while I am getting ready for crush and the enormous amount of work coming down on me in just a few weeks. Spacing out in this situation is self preservation.

If it’s not the case, then I may have impatiently tossed another potential dinner date in the trash by contributing nothing but half a smile and a few nods to the conversation.

My final thoughts on this very brief but somehow agitating encounter are this:

1. Crush is a few weeks away and my mind is mostly on winemaking and all that entails, and that is ok!

2. I will open an invitation to anyone interested in helping with punch down if they promise to document their experience in a little notebook that I hope to remember to purchase.

3. I will try not to space out when approached with unintelligible conversations, especially at the end of the night.

4. #3 is not going to happen but I’ll try.

It’s winemaking Time!