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“Don't be scared, it's going to sound like a gun going off,” said Graham Pierce from below as I stood on a three-metre-high catwalk leaning over a dumpster-sized tank of fermenting merlot.

I'd been trying, with a steel garden rake, to punch holes in a half-metre-thick crust of grape skins that had formed a solid disk at the top of the cylindrical tank. Mr. Pierce, the winemaker at Black Hills Estate here in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, decided to help stir the pot, as it were, by sending a jet of air into the liquid from a pipe in the bottom. This caused the disk to shatter and the fluid to gurgle up like a giant cauldron of boiling soup. As steam from the juice rose into a billowing cloud, I felt like some Halloween witch making purple eye-of-newt soup for 10,000.

It wasn't Halloween, though; it was Thanksgiving Sunday, harvest time in the Okanagan.

Similar scenes were being repeated up and down this majestic 200-kilometre valley in a procedure winemakers call punching down the cap, or pigeage. The point is to draw maximum colour and flavour from the hardened grape skins, crucial for a rich Bordeaux-style blend such as Black Hills Nota Bene, a rare, $53 red that in just 10 years has become a trophy among local collectors.

I had come to Black Hills, a utilitarian building that might be mistaken for an auto-body shop, to experience the B.C. crush first hand.

While I knew winemaking could be hard work, one thing surprised me besides the jolt of Mr. Pierce's air jet: Cellar hands in Canada end up drinking a lot more coffee than cabernet sometimes.

This October has been especially cold in the Okanagan, with night temperatures dropping to -10C in spots. Some vineyards have gone from leafy green to rusty brown in a day. Vines have begun shutting down for winter, with grapes still hanging and in danger of freezing.

“Everyone's picking like crazy,” said Mr. Pierce, who joined Black Hills 18 months ago, after it was bought by an investment group that includes the B.C.-born actor Jason Priestley.

The good news is that most of the crop, especially early-ripening white varieties such as riesling and sauvignon blanc, have been harvested, with mostly just the late-ripening reds, notably cabernet sauvignon, left on the vines. The Arctic air mass is one reason I was happy to be punching down merlot caps. Heat is a byproduct of fermentation, hence the steam. With three layers of wool and cotton under my ski jacket, I was toastier on that catwalk than a bottle of well-oaked Napa chardonnay.

French producers may have pioneered pigeage , but Black Hills, like other modern boutique wineries, supplements the manual stirring with circulating air. Oxygen percolating through the must has an added benefit: It gives stamina to the yeast, helping it convert fruit sugar to alcohol, the essence of fermentation. “Harvest is really all about happy yeast,” Mr. Pierce said.

Unfortunately, it takes just 15 minutes or so to punch down each cap, which meant I eventually would run out of excuses to avoid the more tedious and bone-chilling job of October grape sorting.

This happens at the appropriately named sorting table, which in fact looks more like a high-tech Rube Goldberg machine than anything you'd serve dinner on. At one end, Steve Carberry, the veteran Black Hills winegrower, was using a pitchfork to heave freshly picked syrah clusters onto an upward-sloping conveyor. (Although Nota Bene is made with cabernet sauvignon, merlot and cabernet franc, Mr. Pierce plans to launch a new red made from syrah, to be released in 2011.)

As Mr. Carberry heaved the grapes, he would scan each forkful for unripened clusters, which are either green or brownish-red rather than blue. (Yes, red-wine grapes are blue.) “See that berry there, that's not what we want,” Mr. Pierce instructed as Mr. Carberry pitched it into a compost bin.

Meanwhile, the blue bunches would ride up the conveyor and drop into the destemmer, a sort of spinning sieve that separates berries from the bitter-tasting stems. The berries then fell onto a vibrating stainless-steel table and a slight tilt in angle caused the grapes to glide slowly downward.

As they slid along, I and cellar hand Jesse Cooper feverishly picked out any remaining green bits and wilted leaves. Occasionally, Mr. Carberry would pitch too many clusters onto the conveyor at once and I felt like I was channelling Lucille Ball in that I Love Lucy episode with the malfunctioning chocolate-factory conveyor.

My hands soon became purple, drenched and freezing. Every now and then I had to ask Mr. Carberry to ease up so I could run to the hot-water tap for relief.

Once sorted, the good berries dropped into a funnel where they got sucked into a pump that forced them through a hose to one of the eight temperature-controlled fermenting tanks. There they would sit for four or five days to undergo a “cold soak.” This extracts colour and flavour before fermentation, which can start only when Mr. Pierce decides to warm up the tank and make it hospitable to yeast.

Instead of relying on natural yeast floating in the air or on the grape skins, Mr. Pierce will introduce a commercial brand of specially isolated yeast strains designed to bring out specific flavours he's looking for in each grape variety. A butterscotch note in chardonnay, for example.

Though some old-school winemakers rely on indigenous yeasts, the natural route comes with risks. Wild yeast populations are unpredictable. They can tire out and stop feeding when alcohol pushes beyond 10 per cent, opening a flank for unwanted organisms to start gorging on the residual sugar, yielding skunky flavours – a winemaker's nightmare. “A winemaker's No. 1 job is to drive ferments,” Mr. Pierce told me.

When the syrah I'm sorting finishes alcoholic fermentation, it will be siphoned into barrels to which Mr. Pierce will add beneficial bacteria to induce a secondary fermentation that converts sharp malic acid, the kind found in apples, to lactic acid, the soft acid found in butter. This will give the wines a smoother, more voluptuous texture.

At that stage, he'll have to be vigilant for a few weeks to ensure the cellar temperature never gets much below 20C. If the temperature drops too low, the malolactic phase can slow and wine can turn to vinegar.

“The longer it takes … , the easier it is for any other spoilage to happen in the wine,” he told me.

In a perfect world, he said, malolactic is over by Christmas and the wine is left to mature for months until bottling time. “That's like the winemaker's Christmas present, I think, when we're all barrelled down and you just kind of relax because your barrels are stable and safe.”

Back at the sorting table, I looked over at Mr. Carberry, who was pitching the last of the day's syrah clusters onto the conveyor. My shift was about to end. Time, at last, for another steaming mug of coffee.