GRAPE CRUSH : Temecula Wineries Hustle to Harvest on Just the Right Day

They sound like a frenzied castanet combo, snapping at the shoulder-high vines as the blazingly bright morning sun begins to slant through the broad leaves. They open and close their cutters the way veteran barbers work with shears--snipping deliberately, methodically, automatically, row after row and ton after ton.

At this time each year, the grape pickers come to the Temecula Valley to answer one of the oldest and subtlest of nature’s calls. They arrive long before dawn to work in the cool morning air, and sometimes all night, shearing acres and acres of wine grapes from the vines.

It is the season of the harvest--called the crush--in this increasingly popular and respected wine country just south of Orange County. After nearly a year of quiet growth and maturation on the peaceful, rolling hillsides, after standing silently through chilly winter months and bright spring mornings and lazy summer afternoons, the grapes a1919230054testing and waiting and testing again--and again--the Temecula Valley wine makers decide one certain week will be the week, then agonize over whether the grapes should be picked that Tuesday or Wednesday or Friday, or perhaps Saturday.

It is probably as close as agriculture ever gets to an exact science. Pick Chardonnay grapes Wednesday and produce a gold medal-winning wine. Pick them Friday and get an also-ran. When the grapes are ready, they are ready absolutely. They won’t wait.

The period from late August through most of September is the only time of year when the art of wine making can be said to be rushed. And it is then, say the Temecula Valley wine makers, that their lives become the most hectic and the most satisfying. It is also the time when many visitors, a large--and increasing--percentage of them from Orange County, head south across the county line to taste wine, talk wine, buy wine and watch wine being made.

In fact, said Betz Collins, director of communications at Callaway Vineyard and Winery, the largest wine making operation in the valley, “the greatest number of our visitors come from Orange County.”

However, she added, many of them had no idea they could drive south into their own back yard when they had a yen to tour a first-class wine growing region.

“Are people surprised about that? Oh, I hope to tell you!” said John Moramarco, the viniculturist at Callaway. “They’re surprised all the time. They’ll come down from L.A. or Orange County and say, ‘You were just over on the other side of the hills, and we didn’t know you were here.’ They’re surprised that there’s a wine country in what they think is supposed to be a desert area.”

The Temecula Valley is anything but that. A little more than an hour’s drive from much of Orange County and slightly more than 20 miles from the ocean, the valley was planted with wine grapes by Franciscan missionaries at the end of the 18th Century.

The vineyards disappeared in 1904 when cattle baron Walter Vail bought 87,500 acres in Temecula for a cattle ranch. The ranch was bought by Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp., Kaiser Industries and the Macco Corp. in 1964, when the area began to be developed as the community of Rancho California.

Two years later, Vincenzo Cilurzo, a Hollywood lighting director, conducted soil and climate tests in the valley and, with the opening of his Cilurzo Vineyard & Winery in 1968, became the region’s first modern commercial wine grower.

During the 20 years since, 10 more growers have set up shop in Temecula to take advantage of the region’s microclimate--temperate marine breezes that blow from the ocean through an area known as Rainbow Gap. The breezes, attracted by the hot desert air farther inland, make the valley’s climate similar to that of the Napa and Sonoma valleys in Northern California.

Today there are 11 wineries and 3,300 acres of vineyards in the valley. While the Temecula wineries may not boast the size, volume of production and longstanding reputation of their Northern California competitors in the Napa and Sonoma valleys, several of the wines they produce are considered first rate. Most of the wineries have won multiple awards for varieties at competitions in California and throughout the country, including medals at the Orange County Fair, considered by vintners to be one of the more prestigious wine competitions in the state.

At this time of year, all the wine makers begin to move faster, work harder, stay awake longer, worry more and, if the weather is kind, feel more satisfaction for their jobs than at any other time of the year.

“It’s fun to be a part of the whole thing, to watch it happen,” said Dwayne Helmuth, the wine maker at Callaway. “What’s fun--and what scares the hell out of you--is that here’s this thing lying out there in the fields waiting for nature to enhance it. . . . Or is it going to be totally destroyed? It’s the excitement of gambling and beating the odds. You have control over every aspect except the most important one: the weather.”

Moramarco, a 10th-generation vintner who was born at his father’s Los Angeles winery, said that the maturity of the grapes can change within 24 hours and that tomorrow it may be too late to pick the grapes that were too immature to be picked only yesterday morning.

Also, he said, different grapes from different vineyards on different hills at different elevations mature at different times. Vigilance is everything.

“We’ve had the harvest last from 12 to 14 days or from five to six weeks,” Moramarco said. “The weather is something you can’t do anything about.”

He pointed skyward. “My friend up there--I call him Mr. Man--he controls it.”

Late last month, during a spell of unusually hot and humid weather, scattered rain fell on the Temecula Valley, slightly altering the delicate balance between the acidity, alkalinity and sugar content of the grapes and throwing some harvest timetables into temporary disarray. There were even reports of hail falling a few miles away during one night.

Cilurzo wine maker Karen Van der Vort said she had expected to supervise the crush of that winery’s Chardonnay grapes early in the week but found herself instead sitting in her lab and agonizing over her decision to harvest the grapes Friday instead.

“I’m really stressed out at this time of year,” she said. “Everything is weird. Every year is weird. It’s like being an actress, where everything that happens is an omen.

“You have to be your own cheerleader. We’re all really insecure right now, because we’re just farmers who have a chance of losing what we’re doing. Is it going to hail, and are all our grapes going to fall off the vine?”

None of that happened. Van der Vort stuck to her harvest day choice. Friday, the delicate chemical balance in the Chardonnay grapes was, one winery employee said, “perfect.”

The wine making process doesn’t slow down once the grapes are snipped from the vine, however. The pickers, who are generally seasonal employees and are usually paid a piece rate per ton of grapes picked, work quickly, filling up small plastic tubs with the bunches of fruit and then dumping them into a 2-ton-capacity gondola pulled by a tractor or other working vehicle.

Moramarco estimated that one crew of 14 pickers at Callaway can pick 35 to 40 tons of grapes in a 5 1/2-hour morning shift.

Once full, the gondolas are taken straight to the winery, where grapes are fed through various pieces of machinery to remove leaves and stems, crush the grapes, extract the juice and move the juice into large metal fermentation tanks.

At Callaway, the trip from vine to fermentation tank generally takes no more than 90 minutes, Moramarco said.

However, Callaway is the big kid on the Temecula block, and most of the other wineries have less expensive and less sophisticated equipment to handle the smaller volume of grapes. Some, such as the tiny Hart Winery, are strictly family-run businesses and operate out of nothing more fancy than a large wooden shed. It still takes money to do the job properly, however.

“People think of the little wine maker and the romance of it and having wines with your friends, but it’s a very capital-intensive business,” Collins said. “You need lots of expensive equipment.”

Still, the smaller wineries--they are occasionally referred to as “boutique” wineries, a term that some small vintners don’t like--approach the crush each year with the same zeal as the larger operations.

“Oh, yeah, this is the most exciting time of the year,” said Joe Cherpin, the wine maker at the Mount Palomar Winery. “This is when it all starts, and you can see everything progress from here. At this time of year, if you go to our visitor center on Saturday or Sunday, you can’t move. People like to come out and see the grape-harvest time.”

Mount Palomar, which produces about 35,000 gallons of wine a year (the capacity of Callaway’s tanks is 400,000 gallons) is what might be called a medium-sized Temecula winery. However, it is typical of most wineries in the area in that it offers for sale not just wine, but various gift items such as logo corkscrews, books, T-shirts and sweat shirts, glasses and other wine-related items. Like some other wineries, it also sells delicatessen-style food.

Also, like most Temecula wineries, Mount Palomar sells most of its wines in Southern California, much of it directly out of its visitor center.

Among the valley’s true cottage operations is the Cilurzo Vineyard & Winery. Housed in a long wooden structure set on a hill near a dirt road, the winery grows just 8 acres of petite sirah grapes, but buys other varieties from other vineyards to produce different wines. It is a homey place, even folksy, with the walls of the visitor center covered, like a bulletin board, with photos of celebrity friends of Vincenzo Cilurzo and various newspaper and magazine clippings.

A sign near the front door spells out Cilurzo’s philosophy: “I don’t care how you pronounce my name as long as you remember to drink my wine.” It is signed, “Vincenzo Chee-lure-so.”

For wine maker Van der Vort, Cilurzo’s small size means “creative freedom. I can work for myself, and I can make decisions that are really critical. We may only be pressing 10 tons of Chardonnay, but out of that measly 10 tons can come something beautiful, rich and elegant.”

The operation is small enough, she said, that groups of Cilurzo’s friends often arrive voluntarily each year to help with the harvest. There is great camaraderie in such an arrangement, Van der Vort said, but sometimes the romance of it all can fade in the face of hard work.

“When we’re pressing all night, I’ll sleep beside the press,” she said. “It’s not romantic unless someone’s bringing me roses and chocolate truffles at the stemmer-crusher.”

Possibly because of their exposure to the day-to-day realities of wine making, the Temecula wine makers have little use for the wine snob.

“We’re not too impressed with those people who have their noses in the air,” Helmuth said. “In a rainstorm, they’d drown.”

Moramarco said the only truly important criterion for judging the worth of wine is “does it taste good to you ? That’s the most important thing. You can drink any wine with any food. The only question is whether you like it or not.”

Many of the visitors to the tasting rooms of Temecula, Cherpin said, “are people who are just beginning to learn to like wine and don’t know that much about it.”

That, Helmuth said, can be intimidating: “Paranoia? Sure. Some people are intimidated, so they’ll only order what they can pronounce. You know, ‘We’ll have a bottle of purple.’ ”

Consequently, Moramarco said, all the Temecula wineries do their best to demystify wine and offer a bit of elementary education with their tastings.

“We need to make Christians out of more people,” he said, “and the way to do that is not to intimidate them.”

A visit during the crush, wine makers said, goes a long way toward removing the wine snobs’ curse. While visitors are generally not allowed in the vineyards to watch the pickers, crushing at the wineries is open to view. It is easy to soak up the particular appeal of the art of wine making during such a visit.

“There’s always a personal element to it,” Moramarco said. “The thing about growing grapes and making wine, there’s a certain romance about it. You can sit down at a table with the finished product with good food and good company. You try to do that with a bottle of ketchup and see where that takes you.”

And, for some, there is even high emotion.

“I cry all the time when I’m pressing,” Van der Vort said. “During the harvest I walk around all the time with a knot in my throat. I’m dealing with mother nature and the earth. I’m being given something wonderful to work with, and all these people are standing there, and their eyes are shining and they’re smiling. It’s a real sharing and a kind of traditional celebration of the harvest.

“My reward is one person tasting my wine and saying, ‘I really like this.’ ”