The Pax crew treading grapes from Nelleson. Note the squirt bottles of vodka.

Ross digs his toes in.

These bins were nice and small. In the end, the grapes only went up to my knees.

Ross shoveling out a drained tank from the inside.

Dylan on the outside of the tank, getting the must into a pick bin for pressing.

Emptying a tank for pressing.

Cleaning a barrel for pressed juice.

With the grapes in the basket press, it’s time to make some wine.

Squeezing juice from the must.

Pressed juice to be pumped to barrel.

Releasing the press.

Dried must creates “the cake.”

Filled barrels ready to go into the cellar.

A bustling, busy day at Pax.

The wreckage, or what the break room looks like at the end of such a busy day.

The set-up…

At Saturday’s Open House, visitors were treated to samplings of Cuvée Christine, Alder Springs Cuvée, a blend of Grenache, Mourvedre and Counoise, the last vintage of Lauterbach Hill Syrah, Pax Rousanne,”Venus”, and the Kobler Family Vineyard Syrah. Barrel samples included the 2005 Cuvée Keltie, Walker Vine Hill, Alder Springs “Terraces” and Griffin’s Lair. These wines will be released in Spring 2007.

The crowd swirls…

and sips…

Nearly 200 people rolled in and out of the winery, swirling and sniffing and chatting up the pourers: Ross, Ryan, Duncan and Pax. They challenged them with questions about oak and whole cluster percentages, they bought more than they came for and talked to each other excitedly. Some even raced home to post their impressions on eRobertParker. The response was unabashedly enthusiastic, with comments like:

“I also want to thank the gang at Pax – their open house parties are probably my favorite wine event of the year. They are generous, accessible…add so much to the experience and education. Despite the fact that my house is packed to the gills (along with my AMEX card), I am very happy to pay a little more than ideal to them,” wrote one Pax enthusiast, Doug Amarelo.

John Dawson’s post was a bit more detailed, with his very own tasting notes, which, if the one’s Pax wrote weren’t so elegant and well-crafted, would be candidates for the website or back-of-bottle ramblings:

“Pax Cuvee Cuvée Syrah: The piece de resistance of the tasting. This wine radiates a singular purity of fruit, freshness, and verve. Aromas of moss, autumn leaves and black cherries give way to flavors of blackberries, sappy cherries, ripe stems, and freshly tilled black soil. Spherical on the palate, this wine is ample yet graceful, showing no heaviness despite its inherent stuffing. A totally complete wine from start to finish. If Lalou Bize Leroy made syrah, this is what it would taste like. Perhaps the greatest Syrah ever made in California. (98 points)”

Pax chatting with John Dawson…

An opportunity like Open House, I think, adds value to smaller production wines like Pax — lending impressions of the winemaker’s personality to the vintage and generating anticipation for wines yet to be released. It creates a bond between a winery and wine drinker that makes each bottle more special and that becomes one of the best sources of advertising anyone can hope for. We can only hope the minions that left our parking lot on Saturday, stained grins and all, continue to share their experience, and, since the wines are limited in their production, their wine, with family and friends.

With our sense of smell so often tied to memory, we often forget it is intricately connected to what we think of as taste. This is particularly true of wine, triggering the production of aroma wheels and aroma kits to assist us in unlocking and identifying the subtler scents in wine.

Bane or Boon?
Learning to identify varying aromas can greatly enhance your enjoyment of wine. Throughout our lunchtime blind tastings at Pax I’ve heard some pretty far out tasting notes, like Oreo cookies and oyster shells. Moreover, I’ve been learning a lot about flaws and how, in some wines, those imperfections can actually be favorable. Scents of burnt rubber, canned corn, rotten eggs and sulfur are all signs that a wine is reductive, which can occur when the yeasts in fermenting wine are deprived of nutrients and start to die off. Still, in wines like Syrah, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, a little reduction can be beneficial, adding depth and, what some people sometimes consider “regional character.” Many French wines have a more reduced character than American wines, which tend to strive more for fruit characteristics. The 2004 Forsythe Vineyard “The Mason” from Edna Valley is a delicious, peppery example of a wine displaying beneficial amounts of reduction.

Erin Myers, Mary McConneloug and Mike Broderick having too much fun treading grapes…

Their joy was infectious and their presence, along with assistant winemaker Duncan Meyers’ wife, Erin, the likely inspiration behind the six wines we blind tasted at lunch. I particularly enjoyed the 2001 Marques de Murietta Ygay Rioja Reserva, a well-balanced wine, with notes of cardamom and pepper, a little leather and dank earth on the nose and full, dark fruit in the mouth. ($23). We also tried a 2004 Sea Smoke TEN Pinot Noir. For all I’ve heard about this winery’s limited production Pinots, I was surprised to find it über-oaky. It improved tremendously as it opened up, revealing dark fruit, earth and a lush complexity.

It’s been busy in the almost two weeks since I’ve last been able to spell something other than my name (though please note, my last post was actually on 10/17, not 10/6). The only writing I’ve been doing includes dots representing Brix levels in our fermentation log and scribbled signatures on the weigh tags for new fruit–not exactly the elegantly executed, twice weekly mini-articles I’d originally planned. We’re now more than half way through harvest. Our tanks are full of fermenting grapes from such famed vineyards as Alder Springs “The Terraces,” Walker Vine Hill and Majik. Every clamp and gasket is being used, pumps roaring throughout the day. On any give afternoon we might be pressing one tank, bleeding a new one and maintaining a few others. With so much going on, it’s hard to imagine what production at a larger winery must be like.

Mark Anderwald, the “Press Master”

The halfway point was festively marked by the arrival of Mark Anderwald, Pax’s official “Press Master” from Nantucket. Along with Mark came fresh Nantucket Bay scallops, which he lovingly harvested just before his departure. The scallops arrived Fed Ex and the following day the crush rats and their significant others trucked out to West Sonoma County for an evening of feasting at Pax’s house.

Winemaker Pax Mahle and his sister Punky

Food, friends and copious amounts of wine…

The scallops were served sautéed, but almost raw, with apples and shoestring potatoes (the perfect texture and flavor counterpoints to the sweet, briny scallops), as ceviche and with fresh grilled pizzas. They were ceremoniously enjoyed with bottles of Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé and a jeroboam (three-liter) bottle of Champagne Jacquesson Cuvée 729, its superfine bubbles spilling over the edges of our glasses. Satiated, we played a few games of dice, shot off a potato gun and laughed until the wee hours. Friends, good food and copious amounts of wine, that’s what our endeavors produce. Keep that in mind, and the efforts of a few hearty, if road-weary mountain bikers, and we’ll all make it another month.

1- How to use a pallet jack
2- How to lift 50 pounds without injury
3- How to drive a forklift

There were no classes in manual labor at Sonoma State, where I went to college; nor were there any at the University of Oregon, where I went to graduate school. But there should have been. Crush is officially on and, as I battle one-ton bins filled with must (a wine’s skins, seeds and pits) I find that existential philosophy, poetry and a Masters in Journalism don’t help one bit.

Nathan cleaning out a pick bin.

Press, tread, pump, punch
Yesterday was easily the biggest day this season at Pax. In addition to pumping over and punching down tanks of nearly fermented Syrah from Castelli-Knight Ranch, here in the Russian River Valley, we received a few tons of fruit from Dan Schaefer’s vineyard in the Mayacamas Mountains and Grenache from Mendocino’s Alder Springs. We also pressed our tanks of Cattach Syrah, first draining the juice in the tank to barrel and then extracting the remainder of it from the must using a machine that looks exactly like a giant French press. Between all of that we cleaned out the newly drained tanks, shoveling out skins and pits while trying not to pass out from all of the carbon dioxide, a byproduct of fermentation. With all this bustling about, being able to lift, or otherwise move large bins without injury is key. I managed, though it wasn’t really the kind of day to ask for instructions on how to use the pallet jack.

Obsidian Vineyards, Knights Valley

The vines

Earlier this week we drove out to some of the vineyards we source fruit from, to see what the grapes were looking like, to gather samples and, in some cases, to drop fruit from the vines that had raisined or been ravaged by wild turkeys. The trips were the perfect way to start understanding terroir, the way the climate, soil, slope and sun exposure all work together to affect the way a wine will eventually taste. Among the rows the grapes just taste like grapes — a little sweet, a little tart, a little tannic. Fermented, those same grapes exhibit aromas of the very earth they were grown in, often expressing other elements from the surrounding areas in addition to the fruit characteristics.

A Syrah cluster at Obsidian

Driving up the mountain to Obsidian Vineyard, located at 1200′ feet in the Knights Valley appellation, the sweet scent of decomposing sandstone greets you, along with the honeyed and dank aroma of forest floor. Surfacing in various vintages as “wet stone and white truffle” or “sweet purple flowers,” those familiar with the area will recognize them on the nose of the wine. This elementary understanding of terroir really brings Pax’s wines into a new light. Pax endeavors to make wines that are representative of where they are grown. While they are Rhone varietals, they will never taste just like a Chateauneuf-du-Pape or Hermitage, they’ll express characteristics of the various North Coast vineyards that Pax sources fruit from. Today’s lesson: grapes, surprisingly, aren’t everything in wine.

This afternoon we have to punch down nine tanks, four of which are my responsibility, since they’re the smaller ones. My punch down tool is a five-foot stainless steel pole with a crossbar at the top, one about half way down and an eight-inch flat disc on the far end. I’m leaning against the wall for leverage, my feet on the middle crossbar, my hands on top and the disc on the grapes, bouncing, putting almost all of my weight on the grapes, but I’m not going anywhere. If I slip, I’ll end up in the vat, and I’m already turning purple from the exertion.

At five-foot-two and 97-pounds, I’m not exactly what you’d consider a classic cellar rat (that’s what crush employees are called), but I’m eager. I’m endlessly intrigued by what’s in my glass, the great alchemic experiment that’s bliss when it’s done right. It’s understanding what “right” is that’s landed me here among the wine geeks at a converted warehouse called Pax Wine Cellars in Santa Rosa. I’m the only woman on the crush pad right now and probably know the least about wine. I flail at lunchtime blind tastings where 30-year old bottles of wine are identified with a sniff and a sip. But if I’m going to learn about wine anywhere, it’s bound to be in this unassuming industrial park, Food + Wine Magazine’s best new winery for 2005.

Tread On Me
So far making wine isn’t exactly the romantic process I’d imagined it to be. It’s a lot of physically demanding, look-at-my-new-bruises, work. At an ultra-traditionalist winery like Pax, where machines are eschewed in favor of sweat, it’s even harder. Grape clusters are still tread by foot here, though it’s generally by spindly men in shorts instead of gorgeous Italian women with fluffy skirts hiked up around their thighs. The cool grapes do feel good as their skins burst between your toes, making the frequent jabs from stems and the occasional twig a bit more bearable. If the thought of naked feet in your wine is a bit disturbing, rest assured everyone sanitizes his or her tootsies with vodka first.

Fermenting grapes are manually punched down daily, sometimes more often, depending on where they are in the fermentation process. Tanks get pumped over too, a process that involves sucking the juice from the bottom of a tank and pumping it over the top, a laborious task that means rigging long hoses and keeping them from spraying all over the place. When you’re done with the first round, it’s time to start all over again and things are still slow here. Yes, if the road to great wine is littered with beer bottles, as the famed quote says, most of it is probably consumed during crush.

The real work looks like it’s about to start full-force at Pax next week, the reports from the field is that the sugar levels are about there. For the next two months I’m the ski bum of the wine world — still overworked and underpaid — making fresh tracks through bins of Syrah instead of down the backside at Alpine Meadows.