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By
ADAM
LAPIERRE
News staff writer
It’s a great metaphor, and a question worth asking in almost any
pursuit:
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Making fresh lemonade with paper-cut hands; probably not worth it.
Tasting honey straight from a beehive; probably not worth it.
Investing your life savings in Wall Street and hoping for the
best; clearly not worth it.
Moving to Hood River from Italy, growing your own grapes, making
one-of-a-kind blends of delicious red and white wine and starting
a vineyard in the Hood River valley with your family name on every
bottle: Definitely worth it.
Franco Marchesi is just getting started with his vineyard on
Belmont Road,
but he knows already that every drop is worth the squeeze, so he
has been busy squeezing all week.
“Spring was a couple weeks late, and the fall was right on time,”
Marchesi said on Wednesday.
While sorting through freshly picked grapes on Wednesday to pick
sour ones out of the bunches, Marchesi explained that frost
recently hit several vineyards around the valley, including his,
which forced him to pick a couple weeks before the grapes were
ready.
If frost hits and kills the vine’s leaves, he said, the grapes
will not mature any further because the leaves are no longer
photosynthesizing and turning the sun’s energy into sugar for the
grapes.
Because of the frost damage and the limited amount of grapes he
can grow so early on in his vineyard, Marchesi will blend his
grapes with some from The Pines Vineyard to use for his 2008
wines.
After sorting through bundles of purple and white, Marchesi added
the grapes to his wine press for the next step in the
several-month process that will conclude in the spring with the
bottling of his 2008 Pinot Grigio.
After the squeeze, Marchesi will store the juice in a 250-gallon
stainless steel fermenter, where it will sit for a few months as
the sugar turns into alcohol.
For red wine the process is slightly different: The process starts
in a fermenting bin, where the grape skins are fermented along
with the juice before they are crushed.
“That is what gives red wine its color,” Marchesi said.
The juice for red wine is then added to large wooden barrels,
where it ferments and ages for at least a year before being
bottled.
Marchesi will open his new tasting room in February. And although
he’ll have to wait until about that time to taste the work he is
currently doing, he is confident his wines will hold up to the
test and verify that the juice is definitely worth the squeeze.
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