Midnight Malbec

This is truly a wonderful time to experience Big Sur and the Central Coast.  We get the best of fall with its crisp mornings and vibrant foliage without the dread of winter blizzards.  The local wine harvest is in full swing and by all accounts is shaping up to be an incredible year.   You can see towering stacks of grape bins outside of wineries waiting to be crushed and trucks loaded with newly harvested fruit.  Freshly squeezed juice coming off the presses is sweet and simplistic, but quickly transforms in bubbling cauldrons, swimming pools of purple pulp heavy with the smells of yeast and fermentation, a deluge of aroma only alluding to the complexity of the finished wine.

On a recent evening I was fortunate to dine at the Cachagua General Store, having dinner with a well-known local wine maker, Damien Georis (for those familiar with this blog, he also created the clever reclaimed Post Ranch water bottle light fixture which I've included again below).  After dinner he had to get back to work and was kind enough to let me have  a sneak peak at this year's wine production. Here you can see him breaking up a raft of fermenting malbec.