The "Harvest Window" at Fiddlehead

By Lisa LaCorte-Kring, Co-Founder Women & Wine

September 9, 2005

It's harvest time and the grapes are coming in. My husband and I are barreling down the 134 Freeway just outside of Lompoc, CA in Santa Barbara Wine Country.  I am navigating our way tot he "ghetto", the winemaking facility for a handful of small boutique winemakers int he country. One of these "garagists" is Kathy Joseph, winemaker and owner of Fiddlehead Cellars, where hand-harvested, vineyard designated Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc is crafter with meticulous attention and unbridled passion.

I am bursting with excitement. I get to get my hands dirty and take part in the first breathe in the life of a wine. After a series of wrong turns into various mini-malls and a Home Depot parking log, we finally come upon the low lying, grey and white warehouse complex that Kathy's grapes call home during the initial fermentation process. Not exactly the bucolic winemaking vision many tuck away in their imagination, but this unglamourous complex of warehouse buildings where some of the best wine in Santa Barbara Country is made.

It's 10 a.m. and as we enter the building the small of newly harvested grape must welcomes us.  Kathy waves us in and greets us with big bear hugs. With her curling red hair and piercing blus eyes crackling with excitement and purpose, Kathy is the enigmatic center of the storm. The Fiddlehead 'family' is hard at work - assistant winemaker Karen Steinwachs is confident at the wheel of the fork lift, moving vats of golden-green delicate sauvignon grapes up into the stainless-steel press, where Kathy's able-bodied husband, Doyle stands high above, directing this transmission of the grapes with calm aplomb.

Kathy quickly brings us up to sppe - the sauvignong grapes before us were actually hand harvested by a core group of seven people at 4 a.m. that moring from the Stopleman vineyard.  "Boy, you guys have perfect timing," she enthuses, "we just brought these in". I discover that determining the harvest 'window' is a mysterious, painstaking, complex and oftern agonizing task.  So much is at stake, as great wine depends on grapes picked at a crucial time. As harvest time approaches, Kathy hovers over the grapes like an obsessive, dedicated bee, tasting throughout the vineyard, at varying intervals every day.  With 14 harvests under her belt, she can "taste" the crucial balance of acids and sugars that need to be present. Kathy's philosophy is to craft wines with balance, loaded with the character of the place where they come from.

If the grapes are harvested too late, the resulting wines will be flabby "fruit bombs", lacking natural acidity.  If the grapes are picked too early, the resulting wine will be tart and thin, lacking the opulence and richness characteristic of Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noir.  Kathy also measures these levels in the lab, but this analysis often only helps back up her initial underlying intuition.

Finally, after weeks of deliberation, Kathy will sense the right balance, the stems will reach the perfect color, and she will make the "call:, resulting in the harvest within 12 hours.  During a lull in the activity , when Kathy is working to fix the press pump that is momentarily acting up, I ask Karen how a winemaker like Kathy actually makes this key "make or break" decision. "It's art, it's all art," she confides. "There is no other way to explain it."

The pump is fixed and everyone jumps back into action. There is a lot of work to be done that morning so Tim and I each find a pair of rubber boots from a haphazard pile near the door, pull them on. and make ourselves available.

"Who wants to do more of the physical labor?" Kathy asks. I impulsively raise my hand. I can handle this - piece of cake - I reason to myself. I can take this. Bring it on. Kathy quickly directs me over to the free-standing rows of large square plastic vats full of recently harvested Pinot Noir, all at various stages of the fermentation process. I will be "punching down" the grapes in these vats, bringing up the grapes and juice from the bottom up, and vice versa.  Kathy informs me that during the first few weeks of fermentation, the grapes are highly volatile "living" solutions, with fruit sugars converting rapidly into alcohol so that punching down twice a day is crucial to ensure consistency wihtin each vat during such rapid change.  I am handed a tool for the job, a square flate metal plate attached to a long metal pole. I am hoisted up onto a wood board straddling across the vat.  At first, I lose my balance and fall back down to the ground. Luckily, Kathy and Tim break my fall and I am caught just in time. Everyone breathes a sign of relief.

"It hasn't happened yet," Doyle yells down from up on the press. "No one has fallen into the wine yet." Karen, Kathy and Doyle share a wry laugh that only slightly registers with Tim and me.  I take a deep breath and give it another try.  This time, I am successful, and finally straddling the vat, I begin to punch down the souply purple brew beneath my feet.

There are about 20 vats in all and after all the newly harvested Sauvignon grapes are placed in the press, Doyle hops down and joins me punching down the vats. Tim is put to work measuring the acid and sugar levels in each vat with a big turkey baster, going back and forth between the vats and a work table at the center of the facility. Karen parks the forklift and settles into the "lab" at the front of the building where she beings recording the results from each vat with meticulous, scientific precision.  All the while, Kathy hovers over the entire process, nudging here ("you need to punch down the grapes entirely, I don't want to see any clumps like this, mix them in") and directing there ("no, no, no, you must...").

She is so engaged and intuitively involved with each vat, it an awesome spectacle to behold. She explains to me that while all the Pinot Noir grapes before us are from her estate-grown Fiddlestix vineyard, each vat was harvested at a different interval, perhaps at a different part of the day, and that each vat is from a different section of the vineyard.  Therefore, they are all fermenting in unique ways and Kathy is attuned keenly to the taste and texture of each vat.

"Here, place your hand close to the grapes," she whispers. I kneel down to do as I am instructed. I immediately feel the heat coming off the grapes. They feel as if they are simmering over a heated burner. "Wow," I gasp, "that's amazing. It's alive!"

Kathy goes on to explain to me that each vat is fermenting in its own way. For this reason, each will possess unique characteristics that will become more and more apparent with each passing day. It is a mysterious kind of alchemy to which Kathy is keenly attuned. Each batch is finding its own voice and she is listening. These vats will then go to a barrel and Kathy will know each one well - like offspring - and then will blend them into a cuvee that she will intuit as the best overall expression of Fiddlestix Vineyard 2005.

Suddenly, there is a commotion at vat #25. Kathy's assistant insists that the grape juice sample she is in the process of analyzing is from #24, but Kathy insists it is from #25. This is a minor crisis that needs clarification. Kathy makes the case that the #25 is father into the process of inoculation, in which yeast has been added to forward the process of fermentation and that #24 could not yet possibly possess the same qualities as it ha not yet been inoculated. Kathy puts her face into the pitcher of grape must one last time. It is #25 she declares, handing it off to her assistant and moving on. She simply "knows it."

I am finally finishing my last vat of the morning. My hands are raw and blistered and I am dripping with sweat. Turns out that "punch down" is a full body workout.  I turn to Doyle who is finishing his last vat as well.

"What if my sweat drips into the wine?" I worry. "It's all part of the cuvee!" he smiles broadly, wiping the sweat from his brow. "When you drink a bottle of Fiddlestix 2005, there will be a part of you in it."

I ponder the ramifications of this for a moment and just then, there is a call for lunch. It is 2 p.m. and I am ravenous. Kathy's parents, in from Chicago where she was raised, show up carrying pots of freshly made corned beef, coleslaw and potato salad.  The large metal sliding doors are pulled open and sunlight floods the space.  Everyone chips in, brining out a folding table and chairs, setting up umbrellas. Before long. we are all seated together at the table, digging into the buffet luncheon that is spread out before us.  Kathy and Karen confer about which wines to uncork, and soon glasses are clinking and toasts are being made.  The work is intense and hard but the rewards are priceless.

I strike up a conversation with Kathy's mother, asking her how proud she must be of her daughter.

"Oh yes. She is remarkable. The amazing things is that no one really understands what goes into each bottle, the hundreds of decisions. Before she even planted the grapes, she studied clone variation for months - and soil analysis.  If people only knew - it's just amazing."

"Yes, if they only knew, if they only knew..." I nod and then take a slow deep sip of the Fiddlehead Lollapalooza 2002 in my glass. It tastes of rich ripe fruit, minerals and earth, spice, a touch of tar, perhaps some "sweat"? It is delicious.  I sit back and look around me and feel so incredibly fortunate to experience the day in the life of a wine that someday I will drink, hopefully wiht friends, and I will tell them all about it. I will tell them.