I'm a lousy blogger

I admit it freely. I have, however, been doing some constructive things with my time. As boss-woman of a soon-to-be vineyard, I have some time on my hands, seeing as between now and planting time in May '08 I'm nothing more than a dirt-farmer. So, this past harvest, I worked at a winery. I did everything they would let me do, which was basically working crush, and then working in the cellar until winter came around and there was no work left for me to do.

Now, I had learned and read all about harvest time, and let me tell you, what you read doesn't even bring you close to getting a grasp on what the real deal is like. It seems like no matter what, in books and in other (experienced) people's descriptions, the work is romanticized and all the practicalities fall away. Not to say the work is crappy. Well, it is if you aren't interested in wine, or work with unpleasant people (or so I've heard) - but in my case, while the work meant being cold, wet, achy and tired, it was by no means unpleasant. I didn't stand there (and there was a lot of standing there involved) thinking, "Is it time to go yet?" Not once, not ever.

However, it's not glorious. If you are just a lousy cellar hand /crush helper (and I say this with pride) you still do all the grunt work. You get to spend hours on top of a rickety, sticky ladder, hosing the tartrates off the inside of a tank. You get to do all the sampling and get all sticky. You get to climb up on towers of barrels to stir hundreds of barrels on Chardonnay lees over a period of a couple of days, weekly (Well, okay, in all fairness I really liked the climbing part.). You get to hose off the destemmer at 11pm in the cold. You get to use freezing effing cold water to hose out picking bin after picking bin. There's a lot of hosing involved, mostly with very cold water in very cold weather. And you don't get to make any decisions.

But you're there, in the thick of things, and the grapes you picked are the same grapes you crushed or pressed and inoculated with yeast that you rehydrated. And the caps of skins on red ferments that you ceaselessly (or so it seemed) punched down during fermentation, you got to help press off, then rack, then barrel, and then maybe even put back in tanks and finally into bottles... Well, you get the idea. Working in a small winery, I got to be involved in everything, saw all (or most) of the steps from dusty grape cluster full of earwigs (Ew, seriously.) to shiny, tasty new bottle of wine. And I can honestly say now that I know I would love love love to do it all the time.