Grapes and Tates

Okay, so here’s what’s been going on.  I ditched a day of work this week to help Big Table Farm with harvest season for wine grapes.  Wine is something I know very little about, but as far as my taste buds can tell, theirs is amazing.  In fact, everything they do is amazing and these two work their butts off.

Clare is a total babe

Clare is a total bad-ass and any invitation to follow her around and be helpful is one I will take.  Her husband, Brian, is the wine-maker and she raises livestock (as well as being an artist and graphic designer).  She has pigs (Rose and Petunia), cows, chickens, two very adorable dogs (Levi and Clementine), one lonely goat and a pair of glorious draft horses (Houston and Hummer).  During harvest season the main task for the volunteers like myself is to help sort the grapes, which get lowered onto a conveyer belt and any debris is carefully removed, as are over/under-ripe grapes.  Apparently due to the draught we're experiencing, this year’s harvest was absolutely gorgeous.  They sure did taste grape…I mean great.

 The second day I was in wine-country helping them out, Brian pulled me aside and let me do some pigeage, or grape-stomping.  This process takes some of the juice out of the grapes, which then sits with the skins for a while to soak up the color, etc.  It was fun!  The grapes were cool and sticky and a little bit pokey.  After about 15 minutes my feet got pretty cold and once I was through with the fifth and final vat, I felt like I was walking on wooden stumps.  All in good fun though, I was a happy camper and glad to have participated in such a novel activity.

Back on the farm we finished harvesting all of our potatoes today.  Sheesh, have we got potatoes!  Our biggest winner this year was a potato Adam found mixed in with the Yukon Golds a while back.  It had the size and shape of a Yukon but with a pink skin.  So he named it Sunset.  We pulled some enormous Sunsets out of the ground today. 

Pictured here is Jeremy "Q-Ball" our newest farmer, who has been such a pleasure to hang out with (not to mention a fabulous gym-buddy).  He is holding some lovely Sunset taters.

My favorite thing to do when harvesting potatoes is to be the "Potato Munchkin", who follows after the pitchforks and digs through the soil making chimpanzee noises and snatching up all that starchy goodness from the earth.

After some good, hard diggin' we celebrated with a porky lunch all thanks to Big Table Farm!  Yahoo!  We still had some of their pork chops left in the freezer and a bottle of the Laughing Pig Rose which Clare gave me.  Pigs on pigs (with collards, farm-made applesauce and corn bread).  It was delish.

Thank Big Table Farm!