‘Feel that electricity in the air’: Grape harvest in Sonoma County — there is nothing like it

If you’ve lived in Sonoma County through harvest season, you may recognize this person: Grubby, dusty-booted, and perhaps a bit haggard-looking, with purple fingernails and an air of anticipation, lining up in the supermarket at 6 a.m.

Their basket holds a seemingly random assortment of items: several boxes of gallon-size Ziploc bags, Sharpie markers, chips, a couple of sandwiches and some sort of caffeine. Always caffeine.

You, friend, have just crossed paths with a winemaker. Or maybe a harvest intern or lab tech — just one of the thousands of folks who work in Sonoma’s signature industry, where last year’s crop was valued at $357 million.

Early October is near the peak of harvest action, a high-stakes moment that’s a bit like the Olympics, the U.N. General Assembly, and the finals of “Iron Chef Masters” rolled into one. It’s a time when thousands of essential workers labor in the fields, harvesting the valuable fruit produced by more than 1,800 wine-grape growers in Sonoma County.

Those Ziploc bags? They’re for holding samples of grapes, collected in the vineyard and brought back to the winery to see how close to picking time it might be. The winemaker is seeking the right balance of sugars, acid and deliciousness, and those samples are like a window into the future: a glimpse of the someday wine that might be made.

The Sharpies? To mark blue painter’s tape — stuck onto plastic buckets to label a sample, marking a tank of fermenting wine that needs attention, or labeling which lot of wine is contained in a stack of oak barrels.

Sharpies are just one of many small things that make a winery run.

“It’s like at the beginning of COVID, when everyone stole all the toilet paper. Now, when harvest is hitting, everyone is going for them. Sharpies, indispensable. That blue tape, indispensable,” said Crista Coccia, a winemaker for Dos Piedras Wines, a small label she launched with her wife and a couple of friends just two years ago.

Growing up in Glen Ellen, Coccia developed an innate sense of the rhythms of harvest season and now makes her wine at a natural-wine co-op in Sonoma.

Coming into harvest, the first thing Coccia says she notices is all the gorgeous fruit hanging down and looking plump on the vines. And then it’s the trucks.

“You just start seeing those flatbed trucks and those macro bins everywhere, the tractors and trucks hauling around bins, dropping them off in front of vineyards,” she said.

“And you just know. Like, you can feel that electricity in the air.”

Butterflies in the stomach

Harvest is part of the annual drumbeat of life in Sonoma County, where an estimated 60,000 of the county’s 1 million acres of land are planted to vineyards.

Here, there are 18 unique American Vitricultural Areas. Each has its own history, unique soil, and micro-climate.

The season usually begins in early August, when grapes for sparkling wine are picked. Those wines are made with fruit at an earlier stage of ripeness, when they contain less sugar. Different varietals of grapes ripen at different points in the season, and the microclimates they’re grown in have a lot to do with when they’re ready.

From the beginning of harvest to the end, it’s a time of intense activity — and intense beauty.

In Sonoma Valley, the patchwork quilt of vineyard blocks are bright green with hints of yellow, and clusters of purple or golden fruit hang down, fat and full of possibility. Late at night, you can see the lights of picking crews doing the difficult work of harvest: slicing each cluster from the vine and running tubs of fruit to waiting bins.

They typically pick before the sun rises, both to protect themselves from heat and to keep the grapes cool, then race to get the crop to the winery in the early daylight hours.

Bryan Avila, who teaches winemaking at Santa Rosa Junior College, says he gets butterflies in his stomach at the start of every harvest season. “As soon as you see the clusters, you know harvest is not too far away,” he said.

“So, just driving to work every day, you’re kind of like, oh my goodness, we have fruit on the vine … You know your life is going to change for about two to three months solid.”

“It’s the big moment of the year, right? You get one shot to ‘call the pick,’ to bring (those grapes) in. And then, once you call the pick, you’ve got one shot to make the wine that you’ve got in your head,” Avila said.

For Eric Sussman, the longtime proprietor at Radio-Coteau, which makes cult-status pinot noir near Occidental, harvest reflects an ever-evolving set of challenges and opportunities.

“It’s a pretty consuming kind of season, both emotionally and physically,” he said.

“Not only are we, you know, presented with an enormous task of pulling off the season’s crop and turning it into wine, but we also have to contend with the ups and downs of the weather, and Mother Nature, and things in the natural world.”

‘Blown away’ by the aromas

About this time of year, Sonoma County’s wineries are filled with tanks of fermenting wine. Every winemaker will tell you it’s the best smell in the universe.

Belén Ceja grew up in a winegrowing family and now runs Heirs of My Dreams, a winery and custom crush facility in Sonoma with her sister, Ellie. Ceja said once fermentation starts, walking through the winery is a rich sensory experience.

“It’s basically like when people walk into a bake shop, when you smell all of those beautiful, nice smells, and you’re like, ‘Mmm, bread.’ That’s how I feel about harvest time. You walk in and you smell these,” Ceja said as she gestured to a lineup of barrels and tanks.

“And it just kind of brings back, like, man, it’s really happening.”

For Ceja, harvest brings out every emotion at once.

“It’s an adrenaline rush basically the whole entire time … From the start of it, when you’re unloading the trucks, as you weigh out the bins and say, ‘OK, these grapes are beautiful… these beautiful black little marbles.’”

Winemaker Jeff Hinchliffe of Hanna Winery soaks up harvest with all his senses.

“When you can, you stop to enjoy the whole aspect of it, the smells and the joy — the aromas of fermentation,” he said.

Hinchliffe loves to bring visitors to the winery to experience harvest firsthand.

“To take people and let them smell what’s going on here, what’s happening. There isn’t anybody that just doesn’t get blown away by the aromas of a tank of fermenting SB (sauvignon blanc). It’s my go-to. And that energizes me, too, because it kind of affirms what we’re doing.”

Avila agreed basking in the beauty of just-picked grapes or the smells of a fermenting tank bring harvest alive.

“It’s the little rewards that nature gives you, right?” he said. “These smells and tastes along the way as you watch this go from being just produce to something that’s really, really delicious.”

Living in the moment

Despite the sensory overload and the joy in seeing a vision come to life someday in the glass, harvest still means three months away from loved ones and getting by on very little sleep. At times, it can feel like the crew gets through the long weeks of harvest by sheer force of will.

For Belén Ceja, long harvest days are also days spent away from her infant daughter, who stays with her husband and mom while she’s at the winery.

Ceja, who was eight months pregnant during last year’s harvest, wakes up at around 4:30 a.m. to nurse her daughter, now 9 months old, before arriving to work at around 5:30 a.m.

“And it’s not one of those, ‘Hey, let’s clock in, clock out.’” she said. “You go until you’re finished … And you sleep like there’s no tomorrow.”

Sometimes, her mother brings the baby to the winery at lunch for a visit.

Hinchliffe rides his bike to the winery in the predawn hours, doing much of the day’s planning in his head as he rides, arriving around 5 a.m. He tries not to take a single day off during harvest, believing that it would break the flow of the routine.

“Don’t take time off. Do not. Come in every day; don’t break the rhythm,” he said. “There’s just three days: there’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow. You live purely in the moment.”

Eric Sussman at Radio-Coteau gets his crew through the season with big harvest-family lunches.

“We have a biodynamic farm, so we grow a lot of food, and we’ve had interns or people on our staff that are really talented in the kitchen. So, we’ll cook a nice meal for lunch, we’ll enjoy that together. And this year, we happened to have a talented local musician on our staff. So, sometimes he’s picking up the guitar and playing some music.”

Music’s a big thing in most cellars, explained Sussman.

“We have a team that spans the age of, say, early 20s to early 50s. And so the Spotify channel gets to cycle through all the different genres … from bedroom pop to Bob Dylan.”

One adage of harvest is that you can’t get through the season without your harvest family. Spending so much time together, the crew develops a tight bond. And winemakers will say that while the work can seem glamorous, they spend a lot of time either writing work orders or up to their elbows in grapes, their boots and jeans sticky with juice.

“I call wine the benign dictator. Our lives are at the mercy of the grape. We live under the yoke of these photosynthesizing monsters, and that gives a flow to your life; a natural flow,” Hinchliffe said.

And when you’re in the thick of harvest and something interrupts that flow, unsung heroes often step in to save the day. When a press stops working or the conveyor line gets jammed, the winery’s engineer or the equipment repair person can be the most important person in the world.

“If that press malfunctions and you’re sitting on 15 tons of grapes that you need to process that day — that is so crucial,” said Crista Coccia.

“So, yeah, shout-out to all those behind the scenes. Those are our silent heroes for sure. … This is not the days of ‘I Love Lucy’ where we’re stomping grapes with our feet, you know. We are relying on machinery, and without those mechanics, well, we just simply couldn’t do it.”

The light shifts

After the fall equinox, as harvest progresses, the light begins to shift in the sky and the nights grow even cooler, said Crista Coccia.

“I notice that light, you know, the angle of the sun in the sky. The contrast in temperature between cool nights and still-warm days makes the grapes more flavorful and the wines even better,” she explained.

And in October, as the days get shorter, the cadence of harvest starts to slow. The early-morning parade of flatbed trucks carrying grapes winds down to a trickle as the last of the red grapes, often cabernet sauvignon, are pulled off the vines.

At the winery, the daily work turns from processing newly picked grapes to seeing the last of the fermenting red tanks finish and get pressed. Newborn baby wines are put into barrels or tanks to age. And huge stacks of empty white macro bins grow taller alongside the crushpad, not to be used again until the following vintage.

At many Sonoma wineries, the season winds down by early November or so. Partners start appearing at the dinner table again, and “harvest widows,” as spouses at home are sometimes jokingly called, reacquaint themselves with loved ones.

At Hanna Winery, things don’t really slow down until the last of the white wines are blended and bottled, usually around Dec. 1. That’s when Jeff Hinchliffe goes to the desert for some alone time to hike the canyons.

Eric Sussman said it’s a time to reflect on the reality of what they’ve just been through together.

“I think a lot of the epiphany about why (the team is) doing what they’re doing kind of surfaces towards the end of harvest … Or even after the vintage is over, when they kind of look back on, ‘Hey, wow. I couldn’t believe how many times I did that task, and now I understand why it had to be done that way.’”

For Belén Ceja, harvest is a state of mind, one which is never far from her thoughts.

“It really is so beautiful,” she said.

“At the end of the day, when the sun’s going down, and you’re like, man, I was here when the sun came up. You just look out and you see that sunset and you’re, like, this is absolutely gorgeous. I am so lucky to live here.”