Veteran team dominates 2015 grape stomp championship

Jane Engdahl gathered the competitors around to deliver important advice: Communicate with their juice jockeys ahead of time, she said, to make a plan? for the handoff if a second gallon-jug was needed.

It was a beautiful, warm afternoon Sunday at the Sonoma County Harvest Fair and a five-piece band was playing Dixieland jazz. The stage was set with ?11 half-barrels of alicante grapes (in the end, 10 teams took part).

Another important reminder: The winner of the $1,500 prize in the World Championship Grape Stomp Finals had to fill out tax forms before going home, said Engdahl, the fair’s special events coordinator.

Then the juice jockeys, Sonoma County Fair employees in green T-shirts, were assigned to the two-person teams. A few minutes later, as the competing teams were introduced and took the stage, bets were being offered in the jockey bullpen on who would produce the most pounds of red grape juice.

Leading up to this point had ?been preliminary rounds in which ?102 teams stomped their way through 30 pounds of grapes at a time.

Some of the finalists had cuts on their hands and calves. More were sure to come. The barrels held 60 pounds of grapes on Sunday. Contestants had five minutes to do their worst.

Communication is the key, said Jessica Dueck, 13, of Santa Rosa, who was the stomper on her team; her father, Ken Dueck, 50, was the swabber, who crouches at the barrel spout, scooping the juice through a screen into a jug.

“We have our system,” she said. “When he says ‘push,’ or ‘yes,’ I’ll keep sliding it forward. And if I can’t get enough juice out, I’ll switch from sliding to stomping.”

This year’s weather had contributed to grapes producing far less juice, experienced competitors said.

“The grapes are dry,” said swabber Jed Szajkowski, 20, of Santa Rosa. During the prelims, his team - the stomper was his uncle Jack Szajkowski, 59, of Cotati - produced just 6.7 gallons of juice.

“That’s awful,” he said.

Szajkowski won the youth stomp two years running as a 14- and 15-year-old. His father was a champion once, too.

“It’s a family tradition, it brings me back,” he said. “I’ve been doing this since I was a kid and I’ve been in the finals seven times. I’m just dying to win.”

About 100 spectators cheered wildly as the final stomp began, a mess of flying grape juice, scraps of deep purple alicante skins, bits of leaves and stems.

“Come on, you’re doing it, you’re doing it,” a woman yelled as the pace picked up and time drew on.

“You’ve got to pick it up, buddy,” a man yelled.

In the end, experience won out, as a mother-son team that has won eight of the last nine years took it home again.

“Oh, my God, I can’t believe it,” said a juice-stained Michelle Kaluahine, 60, of Santa Rosa.

Her son, Kopa Kaluahine, 34, of Santa Rosa - who said he practices stomping and swooshing in the shower - was stained and a bit out of breath.

“It was really hard,” he said. “There was barely any juice. The grapes were so dry it felt like rubber grapes.”

When the winners were announced, there was good-natured heckling: “Stay home next time,” one person said. “Give someone else a chance.”

“We see the same faces every year, and I know that they’re gunning for us,” Kopa Kaluahine said. “It’s a lot of pressure on us to keep on winning, but that’s also most of the fun, the pressure.”

Staff Writer Jeremy Hay blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach him at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay