New Slang

            The Aussies are funny about their slang.  It is an art to them, well developed and highly practiced.  But, I confess: I often times don’t quite follow the logic.

            Case in point, Australian Nick on the arvo shift (See, there we go.  ‘Arvo’ is Aussie shorthand for ‘afternoon’) hails me one day.  “Oi, Daniel.  Do you know what we call you Americans?”

            “Yanks?”

            “Well, that too.  But, we call you ‘seppos’!”

            “Seppos?  Oh, ok.”

            “…”

            “Uhm… Why?”

            “Back in World War II, everyone called Americans ‘yanks’.  But ‘yank’ rhymes with ‘tank’.  Septic tank.  ‘Seppo’, like ‘septic’.”

            “But… ‘Yank’ was already slang for ‘American’.”

            “Well, yeah, but…  ‘Seppo’ is better.”

            Your logic is truly dizzying, Nicholas.

            But we’re just getting started!  For a week straight, Nick and I get put on pump-over duty.  I’ve done pump-overs before, both back home and here at Bird in Hand, but for Nick, who’s mostly been cleaning tanks and doing other grunt work, it’s the first time he’s had a crack at the operation.

            There are two basic variations of the pump-over.  Different places have different names for them, but at BnH they are called ‘CPO’ and ‘APO’.

Nick takes a swig.
Liters of wine are lost, each pump-over, in this manner.

            Pump-overs are performed on fermenting red wines.  Because the ferment creates CO₂, a cap of grape skins and seeds rises to the top of the vessel.  It is best to have the cap either wetted by a pump-over or pushed back down into the wine via a punch down, several times a day.  Both methods reincorporate the grape skins and seeds back into the wine, where color and tannin are better extracted.  Additionally, the operation introduces oxygen back into the wine, which helps the yeast achieve a healthy ferment (stressed yeast tend to have stinky ferments).  Also, by keeping the cap wet the wine will tend to protect itself against volatile acidity problems developing at this early a stage in the process.

            The CPO, or ‘closed pump-over’, is the simpler of the two operations and, according to BnH methodology, means draining wine off the racking valve near the bottom of the tank, and pumping that wine back over the cap.  CPOs tend to be performed near the end of the ferment, when a lot of oxygen being introduced might not necessarily benefit the wine but the cap still needs to be kept wet.

            The more intensive operation, the ‘aerated pump-over’ (or ‘APO’, although I think I prefer the Sunset Hills moniker for the procedure: ‘Big Air’), involves allowing the wine to pour out of the bottom valve and through a metal screen, which both helps aerate the wine and filters out seeds and skins, which could clog your pump.  The wine is collected in a large tub, and from there pumped back up to the top of the tank.  Because Bird in Hand is fond of using open-top fermenters for its Shiraz, using the propeller-like attachments that have been developed for use in closed-top tanks is out of the question.  Too much spraying in all directions; an APO on an open-top fermenter requires a human handler.

            In this case, that handler is Nick, who heroically is poised up on the catwalk overlooking the fermenters, blasting the cap of grape skins and seeds with the spitting end of the hose.  This is known as ‘fire hosing’, which should explain the technique pretty well.

            Nick is having a blast doing this.  We’ve been charged with pumping-over some twelve or so different lots of wine, some Merlot but mostly an ungodly amount of over-extracted and over-ripened Shiraz (aka Syrah), the Shiraz so dark as to be more purple-black than red and ezaktly the type of thing that would tattoo all of these minor cuts and abrasions on our hands, which we've been accumulating for the past few weeks.

Part of pumping over necessitates samples, for Baume and temp.  Well, samples include taste testing, too, for my Aussie friend and myself, with Nick taking some pretty heavy doses and looking to be drunk by smoke-o.  And this juice, like most all the fruit in Australia, is too hot.  If the ferments keep rocking on this way, it's all gonna come out at 17% alcohol.  (Cellar secret, here:  I know some stuff “in the general area” has received “Jesus Units” to bring down the ABV, and tartaric to keep the acid levels up so that the thing still resembles wine.  Welcome to the New World, baby.)

So Nick stands on the catwalk, fire-hosing the cap with the juice I'm pumping up to him, and I scramble up there with a bucket, my graduated cylinder and hydrometers and thermometer.  I lean way down into the tank and grab a sample and, wild-eyed and blitzed and grinning like madmen we drink up, purple-teethed and red-handed.

Wine with dinner in "the tea room".

Well, by the time we're ready for smoke-o and dinner, we've finished up the job, and Nick takes my bucket and fills it with what we both agree is the best grog in the house, of the probably 75 thousand liters we'd sampled from, and agree that any proper meal needs accompanying wine.  Good thing, too, since dinner quality has markedly degraded as harvest has gotten frantic, and we both look at each other over the grub, and say "Prison food" in unison.  Well, with a bit of red wine and the proprietary olive oil mixed in with what appears to be noodles and dead animals, it ain't half bad.

“You know, we should have nicknames for that, APOs and CPOs.”

Here we go again, that Australian penchant for slang.  I can see the gears turning, and know he’s already got suggestions.

“CPOs we can call ‘Star Wars’, like, you know, C3PO.  And what about APO?”

We think about it for a while.  Nick chimes in again.

“APO kinda sounds like ‘ape’.  Let’s call APOs ‘gorillas’!”

It occurs to me, all convoluted logic aside, that both nicknames are longer than the abbreviations ‘APO’ and ‘CPO’.  But, Nick is tickled pink about the whole thing, and I don’t think there’s any use fighting the Aussie slang mentality.