THE CAPSULE| February 2002
Crush Update
We are about one third of the way through “crush” – we’ve hand-picked, cooled, trucked, cooled again, hand-sorted, destemmed, hand-sorted again and gravity fed 192 tons of grapes into our specially designed Flagstone fermentors.
Now, if a rampaging bull elephant weighs 3 tons, this means we have hand-fed our crusher with the equivalent mass of 64 enraged elephants to date. That’s a lot of stuff to pick up and chuck into a crusher. We have been crushing since the 23rd of January, which means that every day we have had to manhandle the equivalent of 2.14 elephants into a small feeder hole, the dimensions of a basketball hoop.
It is around about this time each year I sit down with a beer in a quiet corner of the cellar and wonder why we don’t mechanise like most other people. Wouldn’t it be nice and easy, I imagine, to have one of those big hopper screws you see at big, fancy wineries, churning the squirming grapes along into the crusher. This would mean no more stiff backs and cut hands, because there would be no more 20kg lug boxes. It would also mean no more double or triple shifts with only a quick kip under my desk. Ahh, bliss!
If we didn’t have to lift each lug box or sort each bunch by hand there would be no more sticky red juice running down my arms and no more pips and skins in my hair. Perhaps, I contemplate; we could change the labour-intensive, painstakingly slow, grape-sorting system and install huge pumps that force the ‘product’ (this is what food processors call grapes) into the fermenting tanks. Perhaps we could forget our idealistic crusade of never pumping a grape and manually punching down the cap and stick to conventional machines to extract colour and tannin from the skins.
And then I hear a strange noise coming from the general direction of the fermentors. It sounds like a really good party – a kind of ardent, festive, organic, wine-fueled dinner party just before someone gets up on the table to dance. I am not sure if this party is far away or just in my head. Slowly, I recognise the din – it’s the hullabaloo of happy grapes fermenting. And I remember why we go to all the extra effort.
2002 Vintage
It is also around this time of the year that we can get a handle on the quality of the vintage. And, like every year, we shake our heads and say how strange and difficult it has been.
There is no doubt that it has been tricky with downy mildew and then rot laying waste to many a vineyard – almost all our Pinot Noir vineyards have been decimated (so there won’t be any BK5 2002, I am afraid). However, we have had a good, cold winter, lots of life-giving rain and a cool, mild growing season for many of the varieties.
There are rot problems in almost every vineyard, and if you don’t hand-sort your fruit this year, quality will undoubtedly be affected. However, if you are prepared to go this extra step and ensure that only healthy fruit goes into the fermentors, 2002 might just be the vintage of the decade.
This year is certainly offering us sensational quality. The flavour concentration in our Pinotage grapes is astounding. The Sauvignon Blanc is terrific, but I am always terrified of this ethereal variety and will only know a year down the line when it is safely in bottle. The Chardonnay is looking good, as is the Chenin, but perhaps most exciting of all is the Cabernet Sauvignon. This is the year for blockbuster, mind-altering, magnificent, cabs.
Gregory Morris
Greg’s title at Flagstone was “Driver”, but he was much more to us than that. He died on Friday 15th of February 2002, after suffering a stroke. Greg was extraordinarily loyal and very hard working. He always had a smile and a joke for you and a twinkle in his eye. He knew this city only the way real Kaapenaars can. His funeral was packed with hundreds of friends and family whose lives he had touched with brightness. We miss him.
New Releases
We’ve released the following wines recently:
Flagstone:
The Music Room Cabernet Sauvignon 2000
Writer’s Block Pinotage 2000
Heywood House Barrel Fermented Sauvignon Blanc 2001
The Flagstone Strata Series:
“Rockwood” Cabernet Sauvignon 2000
“The Discovery” Pinot Meunier 2001
“The Rumour Mill” Viognier 2001
“The Shindig” Shiraz 2000
Bruce Jack
Winemaker
