Picking with the Kigers

A couple weeks ago marked my first real hands-on experience with the wine making process -- picking and crushing Syrah with our new friends John and Deb Kiger of Kiger Family Vineyards in Santa Rosa.

The whole experience came about rather quickly, and we were very lucky to have contacted the Kiger family just in time for them to be picking only a few days later. Brittany and I were watching the email pretty closely as it really is a day to day waiting game as to the right time to harvest the grapes. We had been experiencing a couple of pretty warm days that week (high 90s) and had they continued that might have sped up the ripening of the grapes to the point where they would have been picked too early for us to join in the fun. As it was the weather cooled off significantly for us to be able to pick on Friday, so we were very excited.

The morning of we got up early (7:30) and grabbed a quick bite before heading up to the Kiger's house on the outskirts of Santa Rosa. The fog had rolled in and it was really soupy in downtown Sonoma, which only added to the excitement. By the time we reached the Kiger house near Annadel State park on HWY 12 it had burnt off though, giving us perfect weather (sunny but still cool) to pick.

The Kigers are both retired from Silicon Valley and have been in Sonoma for a number of years now. The winery and vineyard operation takes up most of their time. They sell the majority of their grapes to the Biale winery and keep a small portion for themselves for home winemaking. Perched on the lower eastern slopes of the Sonoma Valley hills you can really see the draw of retiring to Sonoma country, with the fog hanging like smokey wisps above the trees and the morning sun just peeking over the hills.

We started with a brief tour of the winemaking facilities (a temperature controlled room off the garage) and the outdoor pen for the dog and the sheep - the all natural security and lawn mowing force. The sheep keep weeds and invasive plants to a minimum in the vineyard in the summertime, and in the process leave a lot of natural fertilizer behind. The dog was an extra large version of a Golden Retriever from Italy, specially bred to watch over sheep without herding them so they can do their thing in the vineyards.

After loading everything in the John Deere tractor we headed down the hill to get started.


The Kigers have two different vineyards on their property. The lower slopes have the majority of the Syrah that they sell to Bialy, while the upper vineyard has Cabernet Sauvignon and some Grenache that they just grafted recently. John told us that it was unusual for us to be picking on the lower slopes that day, as it usually is the grapes higher up that ripen first due to a longer period of sun exposure.

Using plastic tubs to deposit the grapes we got started at different ends of two rows near the bottom and got started.


We were using handy pruning shears to clip the grapes off the vine. John tells us that the pros (ie: Mexican laborers) use little half moon knives, pick about 3 times as fast as we did, and merely deflect the clusters with hands and knees into the buckets as they kick them along. After we were done picking we loaded the grapes back up to return to the house, although not before Deb chided me for not doing a very thorough job.

We brought the grapes back up to the main house where we commenced with the crushing. Like most red wines, the Syrah was to be crushed and mixed together with the skins in order for all the flavor and coloring to be extracted. While the whole operation was on a much smaller scale than commercial wineries, the process was essentially the same. Crushing was done using this contraption the Kiger's picked up at a home winemaking supply store. The grapes are fed into the hopper up top, and little rotating paddles force the grapes through two crushers that pulverise the skins and the grapes. As they are crushed they fall down into a large rotating cylinder with holes that acts as a colander, allowing the crushed grapes to fall through the holes and the leftover stems to be spat out the end.

After sorting through everything, we loaded the mixture into the most utilitarian of containers -- a garbage can. John makes sure the grapes have suitable headroom as the fermentation process will bubble things up a bit and cause it all to overflow. We use a requisitioned potato masher to punch everything down. 

These Syrah grapes will eventually become the main component of The Oddessy, a Syrah-Cabernet blend that the Kigers drink at home. They gave us two bottles to take home with us, and the wine is a fun and fruity table wine with a hefty component of french oak and a yeasty flavor. The wine will take about a week to ferment after John adds some yeast to the mixture, and will sit in a barrel for about a year before bottling.

And there you have it. About half the winemaking process done in half a morning, on no more than a few acres in Sonoma county. Seems like a pretty entertaining retirement to me.