“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.)
