This past weekend was the annual Sonoma county harvest fair.
H. and I drove up Sunday morning for a relaxing day of rural pursuits, including tastings of the winning wines from the harvest fair wine competition (btw. the Stryker cab. was brilliant!), a sheep-herding contest, "llamas of wine country" (I kid you not), and the world championship grape stomp competition. That competition will be the focus of this blog post.
The contest itself is pretty simple. Each team consists of one stomper (who stands in a barrel full of grapes, and mashes them with their bare feet), and one person whose job is to collect the juice (with their bare hands). Each team has 30 lbs of grapes, and 3 minutes to collect the most juice. When you enter, you first compete in a qualifying round, and the winning team from each qualifier moves on to the final. The winner of the final gets $1000, and some plane tickets. Pretty straight-forward, right?
Well, the hole through which one attempts to extract the juice is several inches above the bottom of the barrel, so the juice collection is a bit tricky. It turns out that it's quite straightforward to mash all the grapes (and that takes about 30 seconds), so the efficient collecting of juice is what really determines the winner.
Heather and I had the misfortune of competing against the defending champions (from 2004,2006,2008, and 2009) in the qualifier, and thusly did not advance to the finals. However, our experience in the contest (and watching a few of the rounds after ours) gave me some ideas on how to improve our juice-collecting.
In essence, the stomper needs to create a standing wave inside the barrel, with a maximum located right at the hole. That way, there's always juice pushing through the hole. The collector, then just needs to keep the hole from getting clogged with peels (and possibly use their hands to assist in maintaining this wave).
This may require some practice, but we've still got 364 days until next year's championship. Now, back to science.
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