A Pressing Matter

Published August 9, 2024

On a sunny October day in 2022, I wave a ‘Thanks’ to our neighbor Joe Cassin, as he drives his pretty orange tractor down the gravel road. In front of me are four bins of gorgeous Chardonnay grapes that he just delivered. His empty grape trailer clangs and bangs at every pothole as he makes his way back up the road.

 

My job is to turn these grapes into juice as soon as possible, which I will do with a bladder press. Our press is a Bucher Vaslin X-Pro 8. It is made of steel and about the size of a small car or a very large coffin. It has a horizontal cylinder about seven feet long with a small door through which the grapes get loaded. Inside the cylinder is a bladder which inflates to squeeze the juice out of the grapes. The press is operated using a little control pad on one end. I can watch the pressure read-out on a little screen. The press is very noisy as the air compressor inflates the bladder.

 

I’m a little nervous about this press. We bought it used in 2017. I don’t know if it’s my imagination but each year it sounds like it gets louder and vibrates more, and I’m pretty sure it’s not because my hearing is improving. The press has also been experiencing a ‘Compressor Fault’ error when the target pressure is reached. I get around this error by unplugging the press, waiting for the juice to run out (which can take hours), and then plugging it back in when I want to do another press cycle. By the end of the last harvest (last November) this was happening every press run.

 

Jim is the guy who fixes Bucher Vaslin presses on the West Coast. He is based in Napa but makes a trip every summer to Oregon to take care of any issues. He tried to solve the Compressor Fault problem on our press a few years back. When he took off the end-panel, that was the first time I got to see the guts of this machine. There are lots of tubes and wires and it’s a bit intimidating in a ‘jet engine’ kind of way. Jim drilled a little hole in one of the tubes and confidently pronounced it fixed. He also mentioned that there was a way to run the press with an external compressor in an emergency. He said he could talk me through it if that was ever needed. So I put his number in my cell phone.

 

At this point, it’s time to make an admission: although my job title is ‘winemaker’, I have not taken any classes on the subject. I have learned the craft by asking questions of patient colleagues, hanging around experienced people, and making a lot of mistakes. Because of this, I still feel like a pretender: like I am faking my way through. When things go wrong, I often don’t know how to fix them. That’s because our first seven vintages were made at another winery and when something broke, it was the owner’s responsibility. Now it’s up to me. My approach is to pay for as much preventive maintenance as the budget allows, and employ our favorite strategy: optimism.

 

So with optimism, I plug in the press and it runs through its initial checks fine. There is no way to do a trial run without a full load of grapes, so I start loading grapes in. By evening I have stuffed in one ton of Chardonnay. Now comes the moment of truth. I program the press to start squeezing. The compressor motors kick on reassuringly. I look at the little yellow screen to watch the pressure read-out. But the pressure is not rising like it usually does. After a few minutes the compressor kicks off and the fault alarm comes on. This is a new problem. I know what to do if the fault happens at full pressure. But it is happening at zero pressure. I try my ‘normal’ unplugging-and-restarting routine and repeat the steps. There is still no pressure increase. Not one drop of juice is coming out.

 

It is 9pm. I call Jim. He doesn’t pick up, but at least I can leave him a message. Then I hear a recording, ‘This voicemail box is full. Goodbye’. I’m on my own to figure out how to use an external compressor to make this work. But I can’t rent an air compressor till morning. IF I can find one. So the Chardonnay is going to have to sit patiently in the press overnight. In the meantime I take off the cover that hides all the tubes and wires and motors, hoping it is obvious how to hotwire this thing. I think back to when I was a teenager and had taken apart my bike to fix it. It was just a box of bike parts on the garage floor when a neighbor casually remarked, ‘At least it’s easier to throw away now’. I remember feeling stung by the comment because I already had a reputation for being better at taking things apart than putting things back together. I ended up proving that neighbor wrong about the bike, however. I didn’t throw the box of parts away. They went in the recycling.

 

The stakes are higher now. I can’t just leave the press in a pile of parts. It’s holding half of our 2022 Chardonnay. I take a deep breath and tell myself it’s just a simple plumbing project with a little wiring added in. Maybe six or seven cuss words max. It’s not like if I cut the wrong wire, the winery explodes. It’s pretty obvious which wires lead to the compressor. I disconnect the tubes at what seems like an appropriate place to add in an external air hose.

 

First thing in the morning, I call the only equipment rental company in McMinnville and I am in luck. They have one tow-behind compressor left. It is the kind that powers a jack-hammer. It might be overkill but it should fill that press bladder fast. I park it outside the winery, downwind, and connect it to the press with 100 feet of air hose. The trick will be to shut off the air flow before the press bladder explodes.

 

Getting the fittings to connect the press to the rental compressor takes the requisite three trips to the hardware store, but I think I am finally ready to squeeze that Chardonnay.

 

I plug in the press, with my fingers crossed. Its little computer brain appears blissfully unaware that it isn’t actually controlling anything. This is good. The little yellow screen announces that the press ‘thinks’ it is pressing the grapes and I crank open the manual valve I have installed to control the incoming air. The rented compressor revs up with a big blast of black diesel smoke, downwind. The press bladder fills. Really fast. But not so fast that I can’t shut the air supply off when the little screen says it’s at the target pressure. Chardonnay juice gushes out of the bottom just like it is supposed to! Winery automation may have taken a giant step backward this morning, but I feel a little more like a real winemaker.

 

 

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