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Day One, Part Two - Work (Monday the 21st of August)
It was my first day and we must count the little victories - I arrived, two minutes to the starting hour and I didn't quit midday and call a cab. I learned quickly - winemaking is not about pulling a grape from the cluster, popping it your mouth, crushing it with your molars, bursting juice and skin and seeds, bobbing your head enthusiastically as if wired at 3 a.m. on Red Bull and Vodka while listening to the Gorillaz and muttering, "it's good, it's good." It's not about cutting the grapes free from their perch, putting them through a machine that presses them like your teeth did in the vineyard and storing them up for a while before siphoning them into a bottle, slapping a label on it and uncorking grape to glass. Ask all the illegal immigrants who brave the blistering sun cutting the grapes from green bushes during harvest. And ask the cellar rats who are a most meticulous, sterile sort of folk. In just one day I have a greater appreciation for the wine making trade. We moved about 1,200 cases of grape juice around today, so we could clean and clarify and make the wine palatable, not like that thick liquid poison they drank two-and-a-half thousand years ago in ancient Greece and Arabia. From oak barrels to steel tanks today, back to the barrels next week. The process is two fold, remove any sediment that the wine leaves behind - visual reference - this is less sedi and more Benjamin-Moore painty. The 'lees' (Middle English "lies," pl. of "lie," from Old French, from Medieval Latin "lia," probably of Celtic origin), as they call it, is the syrupy, heavy dew that drowns itself at the bottom of the barrel. These dregs help with color and flavor and their passage through the wine is part of the natural process of the juice clarifying itself. Independent little buggers. But two maybe three times a year, in a good year in a good winery, the cellar workers will transfer the juice around so it doesn't sit festering in its own delicious discharge. The pumping of the juice from barrels to tanks isn't the hard part, it's cleaning the barrels that we take it from. Inside and out. It is a hard task to squeeze human hands and arms, head and shoulders into a hole the size of a tennis ball; so, we use some high pressure hot water and something called H3O ("ozone" for my fellow periodic table of elements personnel) to kill bacteria, et al. Then the barrels are gassed with sulfur for its antioxidant characteristics and drying effects to reduce mold and mildew. Then three days later the wine will be poured back into the barrels. This process also has an oxidizing effect that will soften some early 'green' tannins' as the locals call them. All good for wine and the wine drinkers. Not good for the guys scrubbing and lifting barrels all day. However, when I spoke to my new, good friend from South Africa who has worked at wineries in S. Africa and the land of the Kiwis, he tells me that they never washed the outside of the barrels or the metal racks that the barrels sit on. A head shaking curiosity and a shoulder shrug followed. I thought, we are in Napa and we are making some serious stuff. The wine we were working with today (the Larkmead Estate Cabernet) constitutes 50% of all the vineyard's production. We moved 1,200 cases, and so we will tomorrow and the next. Thirty-six hundred cases in all. The wine retails for circa $50 US. My first day in the cellar and hands on with 3/4's of a million dollars worth of wine. $2.25 million when all done. I hope the investment bankers who put $150 on their corporate green card realize that this wine was handled with the care of snake charmer in a Moroccan market. The day began with the smell of thick red wine in the air and it was early, when the sun was still settling in the upper half of the heavens and I wanted nothing more than to uncork a bottle of white wine and sit on my patio and saunter off to sleep. By four o'clock, I was a beaten man, back broken and the scent of cleaning solutions burning my nasal passage. I made my way home and had a beer and a cigarette on the patio. Wishing I had a couch to lie in the cool air and fall asleep staring at the lattice work that fenced me in. Instead I am sitting on the floor of an apartment with a new rug that has splinters of carpet cuttings throughout and the smell of freshly painted walls.
Two beers behind me and having just uncorked a bottle of Trader Joe's famous Charles Shaw Chardonnay. "Two Buck Chuck" is not the only delicacy I found worth stopping in front of in the supermarket. Trader Joe's stocks everything from chocolate covered sunflower
seeds and cereal, to bananas and cucumbers and apples and peaches and pasta and banana juice, apple juice and peach juice all stickered with the discount California chain store's eponymous brand name. This store is brilliant but scary. Everything you ever wanted to feed yourself in an apartment soon-to-be filled with Ikea's finest furnishings. On a winemaker's salary, I could do well here.
Post - September'06 Back to home...
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