Love and Death in Wine Country

He lay there on the cement, crushed in a pool of purple. It’s entirely possible that ‘he’ may have been a ‘she’ but no on-the-spot forensics was administered. Belly-up, lying adjacent to the large white vats where tipsy guests stomped the winery’s juicy crop underfoot, I couldn’t help but feel a slight tinge of sorrow for the creature. Still, the small lizard died what I would consider a noble death; in the age-old process of turning grapes into red, red wine. Since he was found at the bottom of a deep, grape pool of alcohol, I was consoled that, most likely, he/she didn’t feel a thing.   

Ever since a certain episode of I Love Lucy, where Lucy and Ethel roll up their trousers and stomp away in an Italian vineyard, I have been enamored by the idea of grape-stomping or, as the French call it, pigeage. It’s a visceral connection to the transformation of raw materials into the food and drinks we know and enjoy. Everything we stuff into our mouths has an origin and usually an un-sexy one. So when the chance to be a part of that process finally came my way, I jumped.

To be more accurate, I flew, leaving the jumbled weather of San Francisco for the more predictable climes of southern California. Boh was celebrating the all important twenty-fifth birthday, a milestone where the realities of life post-college finally sink in, post-haste. All the more reason to have a drink. Her boisterous, older sister, Loh, and a few of her close friends decided to surprise her by taking her to a wine party at Kalyra Winery in Santa Ynez where the main event was that unpronounceable French word. 

A ninety-minute drive from LA’s concrete garden and we were surrounded by rocky hills peppered in grey and black. I was expecting a dusty, Steinbeck heat like the kind I’ve encountered the couple of times I’ve ventured to Napa or Sonoma. On the contrary, the day was partially overcast and the air was a cool bordering on chill; perfect wine-drinking weather.

I guess I was also expecting the atmosphere redolent at the wineries I visited when in Napa and Sonoma; i.e. one of high-brow attitude and high-brow prices. While the vineyards in Marin county are exceedingly gorgeous they’re almost too much so, making them just a little too precious. Likewise, in order to try all of the wines at the Coppola winery, for example, you must have collateral and a co-signer.   

Kalyra was a very laid back contrast. The small, ramshackle wine store with the plank wooden deck where the party was hosted from felt like a clubhouse. The winery’s staff was dressed in jeans or shorts and t-shirts. The guests actually looked relaxed enough to engage in small talk with complete strangers about —gasp!— topics other than wine.

While sipping on Kalyra’s fairly drinkable Barossa Valley Shiraz, a friend of Boh and Loh confirmed my impression that most of the wineries in Santa Ynez and the nearby Santa Barbara valley were of a similar temperament. For a guy who spent over six years in Washington, DC and always felt underdressed, it sounded like my kind of wine region.

There were other nifty distractions at the event, too, like a live band with a more than passing affinity for the 70s and a tasty Cajun lunch consisting mostly of enormous quantities of spicy jambalaya. There was also plenty of free tastings and two coupons for free glasses of the house quaff. Kalyra wines aren’t exactly on the highest shelf at your local wine purveyor but they aren’t sangria fodder, either. While my knowledge of wine is mostly limited to choosing between red or white and finding someone able to drive home, I know what I like. I liked the winery’s offerings but not enough to make an offer on a bottle; a tad too sweet for my taste.

Taste, as everyone knows who’s been on a wine tour and/or a wine festival, becomes irrelevant after about five or so pours anyway. At that point, in order to prolong the fun, you get antsy when the pourer keeps yapping about ‘tender cinnamon notes’ and a ‘bold, fruit finish’ when all you want them to do is pop off the plastic pourer and fill your glass to the rim with your fruity drug of choice. It gets even more desperate when the people pouring try visually measuring so as to be careful not to waste a single drop. As the day wore on, such stingy behavior happened more than a few times as we impatiently clutched the stems of our commemorative Kalyra glasses.

When the real reason I had come to the Kalyra compound (besides Boh’s birthday, of course) was upon us, I made my way back to the car to change. Faithfully following the only visual reference I have of grape stomping, I put on a tattered pair of jeans and rolled the legs up, Lucy-style. The vats already contained about six to eight people, maximum, and maintaining balance wasn’t easy considering the walls of each vat only go up to the knees.

Gingerly climbing in to the melee, I used one hand to steady myself on the shoulders of a fellow stomper and the other to grip my shiraz. The cauldrons were filled with cold grape pulp and juice and I wasn’t the only one slightly startled by the sensation of grapes exploding between my toes. After the stompers had gotten used to the bizarre idea of knee-deep submersion in a fruit cesspool all the while drinking some of the finished product, every group in the four or five separate vats tried to cram as many people in each vat as possible for a photo opportunity. Again, balance was an issue. More than once, I was prevented from falling onto the surrounding pavement by my stomping brothers and sisters. 

Periodically, I would exit the vat, wash the pulp off my feet with a nearby hose and watch my friends laughing and screaming and then hurriedly re-enter the vat with them again. This cycle probably repeated itself a half dozen times, at least. Needless to say, I loved the whole thing. Being on the rarely experienced end of the food production chain, literally up to the knees in it, not only reinforced appreciation for where what we consume comes from, but how it comes about. While Kalyra, I’m sure, produces the vast majority of their product by more modern means, it was good to know that they hadn’t totally abandoned their roots. Plus, the exhilarating feeling of wading through the chilled, soupy mess was like getting some sort of exotic spa treatment, only with jambalaya.

A common query posed to me before and after my trip was whether or not the wine we were crudely producing was going to be available for drinking. It’s a question I never really got an answer to. I would like to believe that Kalyra simply filled a few vats with grapes as part of a gimmick to sell more tickets but something tells me that a winery probably wouldn’t go about wasting their harvest like that. Regardless, even if the wine created in the age-old manner was to be eventually consumed, modern purification technologies, I’m sure, (I hope) would be utilized to rid the wine of all of the lovely things accompanying naked feet.   

Oh, and let’s not forget the essence of lizard. Perhaps if I had been the one who felt the tiny, scaled body of the reptile as my foot came down on the bottom of the vat, I would have been a tad less jubilant about the stomping experience. Luckily for me, the purple sea below my knees obscured any view of whatever else might have lurked beneath, hence, we were equally lucky we weren’t making white wine.

Comments

[Ben]

An engaging read, Wardie.

[Tidy Typer]

Good read amigo. 2 things for accuracy - is there alcohol in the vat, or wouldn't it have to ferment before the dying lizard was to get drunk. also, it could be both red or white wine at that stage, correct? sorry to be a bother. i am jealous of the experience, my old and dear friend. keep writing. write a book, in fact, about your trip a few years back with the one super cool kid.

[Mariam]

Yeah, at that stage you wouldn't be able to tell unless the grapes were peeled. White wine can be made from red grapes as long as they're peeled, because the red skin is what gives it the pigment.

Anyhow, nitpicking aside, I'm jealous.