DAY 19 — SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

Today I took my father into the barrel room.

Thirty-one harvests in this valley and he had never been inside one. He has been in the rows, on the trucks, at the edge of a hundred crush pads with his cap in his hand waiting for the weigh tag. Never inside where it goes. I asked the boss on Friday if I could bring my family in on Sunday afternoon, and he said fine, not looking up, which I will take.

Apá wore his good shirt, the white one with the snaps, and ironed jeans. Mom wore lipstick. They walked in between the barrels very slowly, the way you walk into church when the Mass has already started. It's cold in there, fifty-eight degrees, and it smells like wet oak and wine and a little like vanilla, and Mom said ay, qué bonito and then whispered, like the barrels were sleeping.

I pulled the bung on a barrel of the '98 Cabernet from the hillside block, the rows his crew picks, and drew it with the wine thief and filled three glasses. I showed him how to swirl. He did it once, politely, and then drank it like water from the hose, which is the right way, honestly.

He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "Esto es de arriba. Por el roble." This is from the top. By the oak tree. And he was right. That barrel is the top four rows, the ones under the big valley oak, the fruit that always comes in last and sweetest. I never told him. He tasted where he stood a year ago.

Then he said, "Está bueno, mija," and handed me back the glass, and walked outside to look at the crush pad, and I think he needed a minute, and so did I.

Mom is going to tell the whole parish. Probably already has.

Cellar log: in at 5:30, out at 9:40. Nine tanks going. Punch-downs 3x. Barrel room: one visitor, very important.

DAY 18 — SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

Harvest moon tonight. My dad's crew picked our hillside Cabernet in the dark, starting at two, with the lights on the tractors and the moon so big over the Mayacamas it looked fake, like a painted moon in a school play. The fruit came across the scale at dawn, cold and dusty and perfect. I stood on the crush pad and counted his bins in. I know which ones are his. He puts the tub down on the corner, always the same corner.

Tomorrow I'm going to show him the inside. Too tired to write the rest.

DAY 15 — WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22

I had a fight with the boss today, and I am going to write it down exactly, because by next week I'll have made myself either more right or more wrong than I was.

Tank 6, Merlot, was running hot. Too hot. When a fermentation gets too warm the yeast can quit on you, and then you have a stuck tank and a sweet mess and a very bad month. I told him at six in the morning. He said leave it. At two o'clock it was hotter. I didn't ask again. I got two of the guys and we hooked it up to the chiller.

He walked in while we were doing it. And in front of Hector and Chuy and the new kid, he said I don't decide what happens in his cellar. He said if I wanted my own cellar I could go get one. He said it in that voice people use on a dog that got into the trash.

I said I'm in this cellar eighteen hours a day, so it's a little bit mine. He said maybe that's the problem, maybe I'm tired. Hector found something very interesting to look at on the floor drain.

I was right about the tank. It's at 84 degrees tonight and smells clean. I don't know if I was right about the way. Maybe you can be right and still do it wrong. My mother always told me, que no te vean llorar, don't let them see you cry, and they didn't. I cried in the truck. The truck doesn't count.

At the end of the night there was a can of Coke sitting on my clipboard. Nobody said who. So that's either an apology or nothing. He said we'll talk after crush.

Cellar log: in at 5:45, out at 11:20. Tank 6: saved, probably.

DAY 12 — SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19

Seventeen hours. Fell asleep in the truck in the parking lot for twenty minutes before I could drive home. My arms belong to somebody else now. More tomorrow, or the day after.

DAY 9 — THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

My Tía Chuy e-mailed from Salinas to ask what a punch-down is, so, Tía, here it is. When red grapes ferment, the skins float to the top and make a thick crust over the juice. We call it the cap. You have to push it back down into the wine, so the juice pulls the color and the flavor out of the skins, and so the cap doesn't dry out on top and go bad. At our place we do it by hand. You stand on a catwalk over an open-top tank with a steel pole with a plate on the end, like the biggest potato masher in the world, and you lean your whole weight into it and break the cap and push, and push, and the purple comes up over your boots. Three times a day, every tank. And you keep the doors open and the fans going, because the gas coming off a fermenting tank can knock you down, and I'd like to live.

There are six of us in the cellar and I'm the only woman. The first year, the guys called me licenciada, which is what you call somebody with a college degree, half polite and half a joke. One of them tried to carry a hose for me. Now they let me drag my own hoses, and they tease me about my Davis boots, and Hector's wife sends extra tortillas in his lunch for me, and I think that's how you know.

At the taqueria at lunch the TV was on the hurricane back East. All those cars stopped on the highways in the Carolinas, the families trying to get out. Nobody ate for a minute. Chuy has a sister-in-law who works tobacco out there. He went to the pay phone and came back and said she's okay, she's inland, they're just going to get wet. Then we went back and punched down the Zinfandel, because the grapes don't care what's on TV.

Cellar log: in at 5:40, out at 10:15. Seven tanks going.

DAY 1 — WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

First fruit. Chardonnay, two gondolas at 6:15 in the morning, still cold from the night. We pressed it whole cluster, and the first juice came off the press pan green-gold and so sweet the bees found it in about four minutes.

I have been waiting for that smell since last October. Juice and stems and cold steel and diesel from the forklift. It's the smell of the whole year starting over. I stood there with my clipboard and my hydrometer and my eyes filled up, which is a very stupid thing to do in front of the crew, so I pretended it was the sulfur. Nobody believed me. Hector said, ya empezó la licenciada, here she goes, and everybody laughed, and so did I.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 — LABOR DAY

Labor Day. Which is funny, in a family where nobody has ever had it off during harvest. Apá's crew picked Sauvignon Blanc at another ranch from five until noon. He came home, showered, and Mom had carne asada going in the backyard, and my brothers came with their kids, and the radio was on the Spanish station out of Santa Rosa.

After lunch Dad fell asleep in the lawn chair with his cap over his face and his hands open on his knees. I sat on the step and looked at his hands for a long time. The knuckles like walnuts. The white scar across his thumb from a knife slip before I was born. The purple in the cracks of his fingers that won't wash out until November. He is 58. He says he'll pick until he can't. My brother Tony said, "Rosa, when are you going to buy Apá a winery?" and everybody laughed.

Dad didn't wake up. I didn't laugh as hard as everybody else.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 24

The vineyard where my father's crew works sells us their hillside Cabernet. So for three harvests now, the Cabernet I help make is fruit he picked. He doesn't think about it that way. I think about it all the time.

Tonight after work I drove out there with my refractometer to check the berries, and he walked the rows with me. The meter said 21.4 Brix. Dad took a berry, chewed it, spit the seeds into his palm and looked at them in the last light. Still green. "Todavía no," he said. Not yet. Three weeks, maybe four. They taught us seed color at Davis. There was a slide. He knows it in his mouth.

Afterward Mom fed me and sent me home with a dozen tamales for the week. She tells the ladies at church I'm la enóloga, the winemaker, and when I say, Mamá, assistant winemaker, she waves her hand like I'm being modest on purpose to annoy her. My first business card is still on her refrigerator, under the Virgen de Guadalupe magnet, next to my brother's kids' school pictures.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 8

My cousin Lety told me I should write this harvest down, because every year I say I want to remember it and every year it goes by in one long purple blur and then it's Thanksgiving. So, Lety, here.

Who I am: I'm 26. I got my degree in viticulture and enology at UC Davis in 1996, the first person in my family to finish college. I'm the assistant winemaker at a small winery in the Napa Valley that I'm not going to name, because I would like to keep working there. My parents came up from Michoacán before I was born. My mother cleaned houses in St. Helena for twenty years. My father, Ernesto, has picked grapes in this valley for thirty-one harvests, and he still picks.

Crush is what we call the harvest, the whole six or eight weeks, not just the machine. It isn't here yet. The Cabernet is just going through veraison, the berries turning from green to purple one at a time, like someone is spilling ink very slowly. I walked out to the rows tonight and found one blue berry in a cluster of green ones. My dad calls it the grapes blushing.

This will be my fourth harvest on the other side of the scale.