During this temporary break in my career, I decided to do some things that I don't normally have time to do. One of the things that I thought would be fun would be to spend some time in a vineyard and participate in some aspect of a winery besides tasting and buying. I have that part down cold.
So last Thursday after an email invite to come and help them harvest their grapes, I decided to try my hand at it. Having been raised on a farm and harvesting hay, squash, okra (least favorite) watermelon, sorghum, the list goes on and on, this seemed like it might be nice. You know, get back to the land, do something green, participate in something that is referenced all over the old book with illustrations and miracles and advice. Thursday morning very early I loaded up in my little Ranger and drove almost two hours to the winery.
I arrived at 6:45AM..first one there. It was cool and rainy, and a lovely morning. We were supposed to caravan to another vineyard and help them, but it was decided that we would stay at this winery and harvest their merlot grapes. There is no way to tell what sort of crowd they expected, but at 7:30AM their was a grand total of 4..hmm. Not a big crowd. After some donuts and coffee, a brief lesson in how to harvest the grapes with little handheld shears (without lopping off your fingers) all of which was made easy by the simple rule that we would harvest all the grapes..leave nothing on the vine. We worked in pairs, one on each side of the vine, and clipped our way down one row after another.
The vines were still leafed out, so you had to move them around to find all the bunches. Merlot grapes grow on the vine from shoulder height to about knee height. So you spend the entire time working your way from a squat to standing, bending over for the ones in the middle. You fill a flat, rectangular pan up to a certain level (at the level they indicated the pan would weight about 40 lbs when full) leave that pan when full where it is, get an empty one and start over. I started out with a lady who was handling the vines and the grapes like they were made of glass. The vineyard manager walked by, watched for a moment and told us to not be too careful with the vines or the grapes. The next step for the vines is pruning, the grapes are going to be run through a de-stemmer, then crushed. No need to handle these with kid gloves. Our pace picked up considerably after that, which was probably the manager's intent.
Knees, back, shoulders, and hands all get a pretty good workout after 3 or 4 hours of this. When I got home I realized that my hands were scuffed up in the process, little dings and nicks that I hadn't noticed when harvesting the grapes. At one point I was working across from the vineyard manager and learned more about grapes than I thought possible. She was about 30, a talker, and much more limber than I. Apparently I lucked out picking merlot grapes, cabernet grapes are smaller and grow close to the ground..who knew?
The compensation for this effort was lunch from Chicken Express, all the sparkling wine I could drink, and a bottle of my choice. When we finished I noticed we had ended up with about 12 people. I was going to mention that most of these folks only worked about half as long as I did and they get the same compensation..then I remembered Matthew 20, this may be the first time I have regretted my Masters in Religion..too much knowledge.
One thing I did notice was that I was way under-tattooed compared to my coworkers. All of them had at least one and most had a nice collection. The guy dumping the grapes into the de-stemmer had a big tattoo of a naked woman with a cowboy hat, riding an over sized revolver, waving a Texas flag, on his bicep..which was right at eye level for me. Every time I handed him another pan to dump in, I got a close up view of the tattoo, and we must have had 200 pans or more. He was with his wife/girlfriend/significant other and I kept tyring to get comparative glances from the tattoo to the real life woman. No conclusion. The real life woman didn't look like she would inspire the same dimensions as on the tattoo. Artistic liberties?
After lunch I picked out my wine (a Tempranillo, spanish varietal, a nice deep red) stretched my back one last time and headed home. Reflecting on the turn of events that allowed me to do something as old as scripture, yet new to me. Wine is expensive because it is labor intensive, almost all of it has to be done by hand by people who seem to really enjoy it. I had a good time.
Anyway, Godspeed to all out there who enjoy the vino. The next time you hoist a glass, hold it up to light and look at the color and remember that some slub like me dinged up his hands to pick the grapes, some tattooed guy hoisted them up to get the stems out, someone else pressed them, and all along a winery manager was checking and tasting and keeping an eye on it all.
Don
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