Chapter 29: UC Davis(1)
TL: Hanguk
The winery was bustling.
Brentwood cherries unloaded from the truck were stacked in boxes, and the workers were sitting in a row, sorting the cherries.
And even as I sat with a box of cherries in front of me, sorting, I kept checking the workers’ cases with my eyes, or getting up from my spot and making a full round to check things.
“Take out the ones with bad damage, and make sure you remove the stems and little twigs. If leaves are left on, it’ll turn bitter. Watch your hands.”
The cherries packed full in the boxes rustled as they were transferred into baskets. The small stems and little twigs pinched out with fingertips fell to the floor with a crisp sound. The fresh cherry fruits glittered and shone inside the silver stainless-steel baskets.
“Brian, what do we do with this?”
One worker held up a cherry fruit that was split halfway. The flesh had already discolored from exposure to the air. I shook my head.
“Take that out. If it goes into the fermentation tank, unwanted bacteria will multiply.”
The removed fruits were gathered separately and sent to the compost area, and I grabbed a handful of the sorted cherries and stood in front of a machine gleaming with silver stainless steel. The equipment prepared instead of a crusher, a Destoner. To get this, I had personally gone all the way to LA yesterday, more than 500 km away.
"So you're finally using what you worked so hard to prepare?"
“Yes.”
When I poured the cherries into the narrow inlet, a cheerful metallic sound soon rang out as the machine started running.
“Ddeu-ddeu-ddeu-deuk!”
With the vibration, the cherries rolled in, and inside, rollers spinning rapidly separated the flesh and the pits. With a dull sound, the pits shot out separately and dropped into a bin on one side, and on the opposite side, the red flesh flowed out thickly.
The separated pits rolled down firmly with a tap-tap sound, and the flesh was crushed along with the skins, spitting out a deep crimson juice. The cherry juice flowing down through the pipe leading to the tank looked as if a ruby liquid were pouring down like a waterfall.
“But when I studied, they didn’t really separate cherry pits.”
Dad, who had been throwing himself into studying farming these days, started borrowing and reading books from the library two days ago when I said I was making cherry wine. He was pointing out that there hadn’t been a part that said to separate the pits when making cherry wine.
"Ah, that's because those books are for making grape wine. With grapes, even if there are seeds, you just crush and press them for fermentation when making wine, so you don't separate the seeds like this. But cherries are different. Cherry pits contain amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside, so if the pits are crushed, a bitter taste and unpleasant almond aroma can seep out. It's not good for the body either."
“Really? Then why wasn’t there anything like that in the blogger’s method for making cherry wine?”
“That person probably just did it that way because they’re used to making grape wine. And it’s easier that way, too.”
A destoner is not equipment that is commonly supplied in wineries. As I said, wine made from grapes crushes and presses the seeds anyway. So to get the equipment I had to go through quite a bit of trouble, and since people also think there’s no need to go that far, they were just using the method of crushing the pits.
“Then it must affect the taste a lot.”
“Of course. That’s why the wine I’m making this time is completely different from existing cherry wines.”
I immediately scooped up the juice with a dipper and poured it over the tank. A red wave ran down along the wall of the silver fermentation tank. The vivid color was as if rubies had melted into liquid, and whenever light touched it, subtle purples and vermilions crossed.
I tilted the dipper slightly, let a drop fall onto the back of my hand, and brought it to my mouth. Sweet yet tart juice swirled over the tip of my tongue. It was a clean, clear cherry taste, with none of the pit’s bitterness mixed in.
“Good! The color’s really deep.”
“Me too.”
I dabbed a little onto the back of Dad’s hand as well, where his desire to eat was strongly visible. Dad slurped up the cherry concentrate running down the back of his hand and widened his eyes.
“It’s so delicious?”
“Me too, me too!”
Armando came running over too, I don’t even know when he saw, and in the end I let all the workers taste just a tiny bit of the concentrate. Everyone looked as if their minds had snapped awake, satisfied, and went back to their spots to start working again, and I put the cherries the workers had sorted into the destoner after checking them once more thoroughly.
After working for hours until my arms felt like they were going to fall off, I confirmed the tank was filled with cherry concentrate, then adjusted the tank’s valve with a gloved hand. If I don’t keep the inflow speed steady, the juice can foam and mix in too much oxygen. Inside the tank, small ripples were already forming.
“From now on is the important part, right?”
Dad, who had been watching carefully the whole time, asked. Since he’d been studying, he knew that wine doesn’t become wine just because we fermented cherries.
“Yes. Like you know now, Dad, yeast selection, using a fermentation starter, temperature control... all of it determines the final wine’s aroma and taste.”
As I said that, I took out a small glass vial and set it up. On the label were written RC212, 71B-1122, and a few unfamiliar names.
“What’s that?”
Holding up RC212, I said,
“Lalvin RC212, it’s called Bourgogne. It’s a yeast that’s excellent for enhancing red fruit and rose aromas in red wine, especially Pinot Noir. It’s particularly good for maximizing red tones like rose or cherry.”
“Oooh-”
This time I lifted 71B-1122 and the other ones in turn.
“This one is Lalvin 71B-1122, called Narbonne. It’s mainly used to slightly reduce high acidity to make it smoother, and to express bright fruit aromas like cherries. It was mentioned as a recommended strain on the WineMaker Forum, but it’s still not used much. And this is the real kicker.”
“What’s that? There’s no name written.”
“Torulaspora delbrueckii. Hard to say, right?”
"Is it Russian pronunciation?"
"Ah, this is Latin. Roughly meaning a yeast made by Dr. Delbrück? Something like that."
“Oh-”
“This is a yeast used together with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the commonly used yeast, and it raises wine quality and creates a smooth texture and rich aromas.”
At this time, there probably wasn’t a winery anywhere making cherry wine with that torula-whatever yeast with the hard name. One of the reasons I didn’t let anyone besides Dad properly watch me make wine was exactly because of this.
“That’s fascinating. But do they teach stuff like this at school?”
For a moment I flinched, but I shrugged and spoke as if it were nothing.
"School teaches the basics, and I practically lived in the library."
“As expected...”
I turned the valve on the cooling pipe beside me. Cool water flowed along the tank’s outer wall, lowering the temperature. Watching the thermometer attached to the side of the tank slowly drop, I nodded.
At that moment, as if it were a sign fermentation was about to begin, tiny bubbles formed on the surface. Soon, a faint ‘bogle, bogle’ sound rose quietly. The red juice throbbed as if it were breathing, and the aroma grew thicker and thicker.
Standing above the tank, feeling the faint vibration at my fingertips, I whispered.
“Good... it’s started.”
“I’m nervous too.”
“Right?”
Dad and I stared at the tank with tense faces.
***
In the blink of an eye, time passed, and it was already a hot summer.
August 18.
It was an important day. Because it was UC Davis orientation day.
I threw on some clothes and told Mom and Dad,
“Keep the SWP (stem water potential) at minus 12 bar.”
The minus 12 value was essentially pushing them into near-thirst conditions, and it was essential to stably secure anthocyanins and tannins in the grapes.
“Yeah, don’t worry, just go and do well. Your dad and mom are checking every day.”
“Yes~”
UC Davis, about 53 km from home, is an hour away by car. If I get moving early in the morning I could avoid traffic and can arrive by nine with time to spare, and in my case it wasn’t that hard since I was usually up at dawn anyway.
After parking in the vast parking lot and walking over, my friends who had arrived early were waiting, waving their hands. It was Armando, Chloe, and Jacob, who would be entering together this time.
As soon as we stepped onto the UC Davis campus, blue and gold balloons swayed in the wind, and orientation leaders were shouting at the top of their lungs, welcoming the freshmen.
“Welcome to UC Davis! Aggie Pride!”
“What does Aggie Pride mean?”
To Armando’s question, I answered.
"The official mascot of UC Davis is the Aggies. I heard it's a nickname derived from the Agriculture tradition?"
“Ah...”
The area in front of the student union was packed with people. Students wearing matching black and blue T-shirts were manning information booths, and students were standing in long lines, getting their IDs verified and receiving their packets.
“Wow, there are so many people.”
Armando muttered, fiddling with the bag slung over his shoulder, and his eyes kept moving nonstop. At that, Chloe twisted her lips and said,
"What's the point of looking for girls when you can't even talk to them properly? I pushed Christina that hard for you and you still couldn’t even kiss her?”
Armando flinched, deliberately ignored Chloe, and spoke to me.
"I've decided to find true love this time. Love in high school isn't real. At least the love you find in college is properly mature adult love."
"Yeah, yeah~ Good luck with that."
Even at my cynical words, Armando didn’t care and kept rolling his eyes around, while Jacob, with a serious face, was diligently looking for something.
“I’m going to look for agriculture-related clubs first. I heard there’s even a rice-farming club.”
"As expected from the son of a farming family."
I chimed in, but only half listening, walking on with a blank face. Since I’d already experienced it once, this kind of orientation atmosphere wasn’t that moving or exciting.
Inside the yellow envelope we got after finishing check-in were a campus map, a course registration guide, and a notebook and pen with the ‘Aggie’ logo on them. As the orientation leader in charge of us went ahead, dozens of freshmen moved around campus in a pack.
A massive library, a gym, a parking zone lined endlessly with bicycles... A completely different world was unfolding from the quiet farms of Napa Valley.
The afternoon program was college-specific sessions. It was time for students hoping for their majors to gather and talk with an academic advisor. We naturally headed toward the agriculture track.
Inside the classroom, students around our age were huddled together, and a few had brought wine bottles and set them on the table.
“What’s that?”
Armando’s eyes widened.
“They’re Viticulture & Enology students. Apparently it's wine they made themselves. Looks like they’re going to introduce it while doing a tasting event.”
Chloe pointed to a small sign. Viticulture and Enology was exactly my department. I obviously couldn't pass by, so I waited, and after a while, a student opened a wine bottle and poured it into paper cups.
Everyone lined up as if fascinated and took one, and we each got a cup, too. A deep purple liquid sloshed inside the paper cup.
I carefully lifted the cup and smelled it. Even though it was a paper cup, the first aroma was decent. Even with the paper smell killing the wine aroma completely, for it to be this good meant the original aroma wasn’t bad. But the moment I took a sip, what spread through my mouth was a rough, astringent taste unlike what I expected.
Setting the cup down, I muttered softly.
"Ah, must have been made by students."
“It’s not good?”
When Chloe asked, I quietly nodded. That was when it happened.
“Hey, what department are you from? Yeah, you.”
At the sudden voice, I turned my head, and a pretty woman in a short skirt and a tight blouse was glaring at me with her arms crossed.
“Huh? Here...”
When I pointed at the wine in the paper cup, she gave a smirk as if she’d caught me and said,
“Looks like you’ve had some wine before? But do you know this? A lot of the kids who study here run wineries.”
“Ah...”
"Since you acted all high and mighty, why don't you tell us? What's the problem?"
She sneered as if to say there was no way someone like me could taste it once and know what was wrong. Maybe if I’d been from another department it would’ve been different, but since I was in the same department, it seemed she couldn’t just let it slide.
As it felt like a pointless quarrel had started, people here and there glanced over and started paying attention this way. At that, Armando leaned his face toward me, covered his mouth with his hand, and whispered softly.
“Go easy, go easy...”
I hadn’t intended to criticize anything on the first day, either. I’d just quietly said what I thought, but I hadn’t expected it to be heard.
So with an apologetic face, I said,
“No, it’s just... it seems like you didn’t really get the fermentation temperature right. Ah, but beginners make that mistake a lot, so you don’t have to be that embarrassed. It happens.”
Her face was becoming increasingly distorted.
“I said go easy...”
At Armando’s mutter, I quickly drank the rest of the wine and said,
“Now that I taste it again, it's not bad? If you just pay a little more attention to the initial temperature... it might be better... I can see the talent, really.”
As I stammered, Chloe grabbed my arm and dragged me out, and Armando and Jacob downed their wine in one gulp, rambled on about how it was the best wine of their lives, and then quickly disappeared.