Grape expectations: Help make wine in Woodinville

Every autumn, just about now, when the deep purple syrah grapes of Eastern Washington burst with telltale blackberry, leather and Asian spice notes, and when bright-green sauvignon blancs make growers' cheeks pucker at hints of gooseberry, grass and lime, Woodinville's winemakers put out the call: It's crush time.

The term means what it suggests.

Traditionally, winemakers and their helpers would jump into a vat of grapes and start stomping, creating a fizzy brew beneath their bare feet as crushed grape skins disgorged their sweet-tart contents. It was practical and a great way to bond. Even now, vintners in Washington and Oregon host crush festivals to generate interest in wine appreciation.

Today, vintners do the dirty work with mechanical crushers, a more efficient but less romantic alternative.

Still, there's something almost magical about transforming a common grape into an ambrosia that adds a dash of black pepper to salmon, a splash of grapefruit to greens and a lubricant to conversation.

Visiting Woodinville's wineries and sampling their latest vintages can be a relaxing way to spend a weekend afternoon. But I wanted to know how I could experience the front-end of winemaking, when grapes are still grapes and that perfect bottle of syrah is but a notion swishing around in a vintner's imagination.

I was in luck. It's a well-known yet paradoxically under-publicized fact that many of Woodinville's smaller boutique wineries keep lists of volunteers who can be called with a few days or even a few hours notice to help prepare grapes for the barrels, and sometimes to help with bottling at other times during the year.

Most wineries offer noncash incentives like bottles of wine, lunch and crush after-parties.

Volunteer programs help keep operating costs down for smaller winemakers operating on limited budgets.

For the wine lover, it amounts to a golden ticket to hang out with winemakers and peek behind the scenes of an ancient culinary art, where latex gloves and work shoes are more useful than Riedel stemware.

When that call goes out to pick the wine grapes -- mostly grown east of the Cascades and shipped west to local winemakers -- wineries also put out the call for volunteers.

I asked Edmonds Winery winemaker Doug Petersen and his wife and business partner, Lael Petersen, to put me on the list of people to contact when they started crush.

Edmonds Winery is actually located at an office park in Woodinville, and when I arrived there on a recent cool Saturday morning for crush, several 800-pound bins of merlot and sauvignon blanc grapes were ready to go.

Volunteers Mike Metheny of Woodinville, Kathie Payton of Kirkland and Bob Fennell of Woodinville came to assist.

Metheny told me he's an aspiring winemaker in his own right, producing small batches in his garage for family and friends. He volunteers for the Petersens to learn secrets of the trade.

Fennell also makes wine under the label Frog Holler but still turns out to help his friends at Edmonds.

Payton is just a die-hard wine volunteer, willing to work wherever she's needed.

"I did DeLille a couple times this week," she tells me, referring to DeLille Cellars, whose lovely chateau and farm on Woodinville-Redmond Road is a stark contrast to the nearby warehouse they use to crush grapes.

She's a member of Washington Wine Ambassadors, an organization that educates the public about the state's wine industry and maintains a mailing list of volunteers who are willing to help with crush and wine functions.

Ambassadors get a T-shirt that cheekily reads, "Will work for wine."

Payton boasts that through volunteering, she and other volunteers have learned everything from crush to corking bottles. Fennell pulls out his state "mixologist permit" to show he's also certified to pour wine at tastings and other functions where he volunteers. Payton has a permit, too.

But the most labor intensive and educational volunteer experience is crush.

"The winemakers are there and you talk and learn from them -- it's fun," Payton says. "It's a lot of hard work, though."

Indeed.

Petersen uses a forklift to position the first bin of sauvignon blanc grapes next to the small, portable machine that de-stems as well as crushes his grapes. The machine represents a big leap from the days when Petersen and family would do everything by hand at their home, he said.

And having outside volunteers is a huge help, he stressed. "We couldn't do it without them," Lael Petersen added.

Doug kicks things off by using a plastic, food-grade pitch fork to dump whole clusters of grapes into the metal de-stemmer/crusher, where a spiral blade churns the grape bunches toward rotating paddles that smash the fruit. The pulps cascade into one container, forming a foamy green slush. Most of the stems spit out the side of the machine into a separate container.

This is where volunteers come in handy. Metheny and Payton work their hands across the pulpy heap, plucking out green leaves, extra stems and bad grapes, all of which can affect the tasting notes of a wine.

Stems, Petersen said, add tannins to fermenting wine, giving the juice some extra bite and structure. White wine grapes produce fewer tannins on their own, so he doesn't mind if a few extra stems mix in with the juice during crush.

"That's a good thing," he announces, surveying the rapidly filling container.

When the white grapes are done, it's time for the merlots.

We work harder to pick out stems and leaves from the red grapes because, Petersen said, they produce enough tannins on their own.

Edmonds Winery specializes in red wines, mostly blends, and Petersen's excited about this season's crop.

"This year should be excellent," he says, noting how hot, dry weather helps pump flavor into tiny wine grapes.

Payton said I needed to visit DeLille Cellars to observe their assembly-line approach to sorting and crushing grapes, a process also fueled by volunteers.

DeLille Cellars started crush the week before Labor Day, the earliest date ever because of the weather, winery co-owner and marketing specialist Jay Soloff told me.

On any given crush day, more than 20 volunteers may be needed at DeLille.

I stopped by on a Sunday afternoon and found that only a handful of volunteers were on hand because of a snafu with the electronic mailing list.

So I pulled on some latex gloves and took up position at a 10-foot-long conveyor belt where volunteers were removing "jacks," the pronged stems that form little clusters of grapes but which don't fall away easily in the mechanical de-stemmer.

The conveyor belt where I was stationed is one of two in DeLille's warehouse. The other belt vibrates to help sorters spot flawed fruit, leaves and other bad guys before stems are removed.

The dual conveyor belts represent an unusual -- even fussy -- process, but having all those volunteers sort the grapes helps DeLille red wine's trademark dense, complex flavors to come through that much more.

"It allows this kind of process in a lot of ways," said Mike MacMorran, DeLille's rat de cave ("cave rat" in French, aka cellar master). Ten tons of grapes will come through on a normal crush day this year, totaling about 200 tons in all.

"For people who are really into wine, it's great," MacMorran said of volunteers. "We really encourage them to ask questions on anything they'd like to talk about. In two years (many DeLille reds are aged for about 20 months) they can say they had a personal stake in our wine."

Jim and Edith Batalis of Bellevue have been volunteering at DeLille for eight years.

Jim described sorting grapes with one word: "tedious." "But I'm loving every minute of it," he quickly added.

It's a logistical burden to operate with volunteers, but DeLille co-owner and winemaker Chris Upchurch says the benefits are clear.

"These are doctors and lawyers and Microsoft workers -- people who are quality conscious," Upchurch said. "Some of these people are pickier than I am."

"They don't just pull up and fill up their Porsches with a couple of cases of wine," he said. By volunteering, "they can go out and say they're friends of the winery, which they are." And they can brag that they helped make the bottle of wine they're serving at dinner.

Among the most coveted volunteers are those who bring a specific set of skills with them.

Bob Betz, owner of Betz Family Winery, welcomes newcomers but also draws from a core group of volunteers, some who've been coming back for years, who happen to be good at chemistry, engineering or some other trade he can use.

He can call out highly technical instructions, and these volunteers will know exactly what he means.

"It's not just 'stand there and sort a box of grapes,' " Betz says. "They're the life blood of this business."

Gordy Rawson, winemaker at Chatter Creek Winery, emphasized the social bonds that form with fellow wine lovers who volunteer to help him with crush.

"The way one person put it is it's community building," Rawson said. "I've met rocket scientists, software engineers, nurses, people from all walks of life. People start with something in common -- a love of wine -- and it grows from there."

Copyright © The Seattle Times Company