Sleepless nights and a lot of coffee get Sonoma County workers, vineyard owner through harvest
It was just after 12:30 a.m. Tuesday and Peter Fanucchi stood in the middle of his Trousseau Gris vineyard in Fulton holding a full pot of coffee.
“I just made another pot for the crew, but they had to move on to the next pick,” he said.
Fanucchi had a decision to make — one that many growers face during harvest — push on with that full pot of coffee or take a rest. It would be six more hours before he could take his prized fruit to be pressed for Las Jaras Wines.
“My old zin vines need to be pruned. I was going to take a break but I’ll keep going,” he said as he looked toward the 130-year-old vines that surrounded him.
He’d been in a constant state of flux as weather reports changed and adjustments were made to accommodate the fluctuating temperatures. “It was supposed to be cool and foggy but it looks like they got it wrong,” he said with a shrug.
Cooler would be better, he added.
Fanucchi worked much of the night on the zinfandel pruning, then turned his attention to his 1969 International Harvester, which had been loaded with 10,000 pounds of binned Trousseau grapes.
As dawn broke, he positioned the loaded truck toward the rising sun, paused to warm the cab and waited as the cold and moisture disappeared from its windows.
“If I don’t dry it out before I go, there is so much condensation sometimes it fogs up and I can’t see,” he said.
Stories of slowly climbing hills on twisting Wine Country roads as traffic quickly passed the old blue truck came to his mind as he drove to Sebastopol.
“It was about here 15 years ago on this curve, on the hill, I ran out of gas fully loaded with grapes,” he said with a slight laugh.
This trip was uneventful. The gates were open. A crew was ready to offload and the press was washed and waiting at Owl Ridge for Fanucchi’s 5 tons of grapes.
This was his first pick of the harvest — a 24-hour day.
He estimated he had 17 more sleepless nights to go.
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