In the Beginning...

I knew I was in trouble. I was a man with graying hair and a prostate that was up to serious mischief and all I cared about at the moment, standing high up on a narrow catwalk suspended across an open-top fermenter that held 8,000 pounds of roiling juice was summoning the strength to press down on the solid cap of skins and fruit pulp that formed a tight, cement-hard seal above the juice, more than a foot thick.

In the pouring rain, at night, I was punching down, or trying to submerge the cap with an instrument that resembles a large, heavy steel toilet plunger with a large disc at the business end. You grip the tool's dowel handles and grunt and push. You're trying to break apart the cap and sink it long enough for the skin tannins and color components to mingle with the juice and enrich it before the released carbon dioxide sends these solids floating up to the top again. They do re-form, and for about a week, and twice a day at least, if you're slightly nuts, you climb onto the catwalk to punch down the cap again by hand. There are automated ways of submerging it but for some of us, the crazies, hand-punching is the only option. It's gentler and kinder to the grape skins we believe, resulting in softer wines.

They say 65 is the new 45. I assure you that when you're punching down on a slippery catwalk and the suction action of the juice just about wrenches your shoulders out of their sockets as you yank up on your tool, it feels more like the new 120.