Vintage Vacation Get Your Hands Dirty While Picking Great Grapes Of The Yakima Valley

‘So let me get this right,” Mark says over the phone. “We drive four hours to the other side of the state, spend a day sweating in fields picking some guy’s grapes like a migrant — and we pay HIM?”

Uh, well, when it’s put like that…

Funny, all the guys said the same thing. All the women, absolutely all, thought it would be wonderfully romantic: pick grapes at our leisure, sampling them as we go, picnic in an idyllic setting beside the fields, wander back to the winery for the crushing. And, of course, drink lots of wine.

Well, since I am a woman, I sided with the rest of the gals.

And hey, guys…I was right!

A few years ago I heard about the yearly Hinzerling Winery grape harvest party but somehow never managed to make one. Last fall, I gathered some friends and headed for Prosser in Eastern Washington’s Yakima Valley.

But before we did grapes, we stopped in Toppenish to do murals.

Toppenish is another place I had always wanted to visit. Before 1989, Toppenish was just another fading farm town. Then they celebrated their centennial and for the party, decided to paint a picture on the side of a building.

To make it different, they planned to do the entire mural in one day. A dozen artists showed up and by sundown, they had a mural named “Clearing The Land,” which depicted early farmers preparing their fields. Well, one painting led to another, one festival led to another and today, Toppenish has 57 murals (and counting).

All the murals show some face of Toppenish’s history — natives, early farmers, harvests. And what was just another somewhat run-down farm town has been polished and trimmed and turned into a neat little place to visit with not only artwork all over the walls but a main street lined with interesting little shops.

Toppenish is the kind of place where you can wander into a shop, as we did, strike up a conversation with the owner, as we did, and have him go home to fetch a bottle of his own homemade wine for you to taste. Don’t miss Kraff’s. The blankets are pretty and Dan Johnson’s home brew is smooth and quite tasty.

So we wandered and shopped and then took the two-hour history tour with Ray Wentz in his horse-drawn wagon (another must) and gorged on marvelously authentic Mexican food.

And the next day, we showed up bright and early at Hinzerling Winery in nearby Prosser.

Hinzerling is one of those small businesses that has its owner at the helm. If you call, owner Mike Wallace will answer the phone himself. He figures he bottles maybe 1,500 cases of wine a year.

“That’s probably as much as St. Michelle uses to start up their bottling line in the morning,” Mike quipped. “We’re a boutique winery specializing in dessert wines.”

The instructions Mike sent out for his guest pickers set the tone for the day: “Bring some or all of the following: sunscreen, sunshades, sunny disposition. If you have a favorite pocket knife, scalpel or bayonet, get out the old sharpening stone and bring it along. If manual labor ain’t your usual bag, consider packing the following — liniment, ibuprofen, Alleve or other NSAIDs, a supply of antioxidants and an ice bag.”

This was Mike’s 24th harvest party. His guest picking started, as such things often do, with a bunch of friends who then brought their friends and so on. Today, Mike charges $25 for the day, which includes a muffin breakfast, picnic lunch, cheese and cracker snack back at the winery and, of course, plenty of wine to drink.

The idea was to caravan out to a field (Mike doesn’t own his own acreage but picks regularly at the same half dozen local fields), get instructions and go to it.

When we arrived, the equipment was waiting. The harvest knives came in two varieties: a curved model with a handle and a smaller device that slipped over your middle finger like a ring and sported a two-inch slicing blade.

Fingering the slender stalk of some grapes in one hand and a very sharp knife in the other, Mike showed the 30 of us how to deftly slice through the stem and let the surprisingly heavy wad drop into a bucket. The bucket contents were then tossed into bins which were loaded into boxes on a truck.

It was actually a lot easier than we expected.

“Those two rows of cabernet are yours,” Mike said, turning us loose. We grabbed. We sliced. We tossed. We nibbled. We also had a few food fights, but in two hours we managed to pluck and dump 1-1/2 tons of grapes.

Wine grapes don’t taste exactly like table grapes. They are…well…wine-ier. They have a stronger, more tannic, far more tawny taste. And yes, there are thick skins and lots and lots of seeds. But their taste is adult and complex rather than that cloying, Kool-Aid flavor of regular grapes.

The weather this early October was dry and just cool enough to keep us from sweating too much. We were on a gently sloping hill with the grapes on one side and apple orchards on the other. The parched ridges of Eastern Washington rose behind us, flowing in pink-gold ripples to the horizon.

After two hours or so, we hiked up a hill to where Mike’s family had a picnic lunch waiting: cold cuts, backyard-grown tomatoes so dense they glistened and so full of flavor they stung our tongues. And cheese and homemade bread and, of course, local apples and all the wine we could swallow.

We meandered back to the winery after a bit, and Mike arrived with the truck bearing four large wooden boxes of grapes.

Using a forklift, he hauled each box to the press, tipped it and raked the grapes into a funnel where they slid into this Rube Goldberg contraption which spun and separated them. The skins, seeds and stems went one way, the juice another.

The juice, like the grapes, had a sweet but complex flavor.

Mike told us our very own juice (which turned out to be one of the better quality crops) would be ready as wine in four or five years.

But he’s got an idea for this year that would involve a “quicker” wine.

“We’d pick a white that matures in the bottle … like a semillon or gewurztraminer. So people would come in fall to pick. Then they’d get newsletters updating them on their very own crop during the winter and they’d be invited back in early summer for bottling. And, of course, they could come over and taste along the way. Then, in the end, they’d have a case of wine to take home.”

Mike hasn’t quite figured out the price on this, but thinks it might be about $60 per person.

After the pressing and slurping, we retired to Mike’s arbor for more food, an assortment of cheeses, warm crusty bread torn into chunks and dipped into olive oil flavored with Hinzerling’s own herb vinegar plus apples and grapes off the trellis.

And, yeah, of course we ducked back into the winery for a tasting of Hinzerling’s dessert wines.

This sidebar appeared with the story: TRAVEL If you go * Hinzerling Winery holds its grape-picking harvest party each year on the first Saturday of October. The $25 fee includes the breakfast snack, picnic lunch, late afternoon wine and cheese snack and plenty of wine to drink. * You should wear shorts or jeans, a light jacket and sneakers. Bring hat, sunglasses, sunscreen, a handkerchief to ward off the dust and a water bottle. * For more information on the grape picking, contact Hinzerling Winery, 1520 Sheridan, Prosser, WA 99350; toll-free (800) 727-6702; Web site: www.hinzerling.com; e-mail: info@hinzerling.com. * For more information on Toppenish, call the Toppenish Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 28, Toppenish, WA 98948; toll-free, (800) 569-3982; Web site: www.toppenish.org. * For details on Ray Wentz’s two-hour history tour aboard a horse-drawn wagon, call (509) 865-4515.