A lot beer goes into making wine

So I recently finished a stint working at the vineyard winery once again. Here is some snippets of my experience.
-I worked twelve straight days averaging 10 hours a day. That was kind of tough.

-The first day was the worst. I was going on 4.5 hours of sleep and sore as after playing nationals with a small squad and playing almost every point. That day was also the first of three involving mostly heavy lifting as the work.

-The first three days were very strange. We had 20-60 contract workers there doing hand grape picking. Despite my temporary status I was working for the vineyard directly so I was not picking but facilitating. That mostly involved taking the grapes they dropped into bins weighing 10-25 kilos (roughly 20-50 pounds) and picking them up and putting the fruit in larger bins being pulled by a four wheeler I would drive. It was hectic work because there were only so many small bins and we had to get them emptied and moved over so the pickers could keep going. There was also weird animosity between the contract workers and the regular staff.

-After that the vineyard work mainly involved nets. Reds are hand picked but white wine grapes are machine harvested. However to drive the harvester over them you have to take off these huge nets (the same ones I spent a week putting up a while back). So I was working to take off and tie up these huge nets. This was less grueling work but did get repetitive after seven straight days of it.

-While working in the vineyard I ate a shit ton of grapes. Wine grapes are amazingly delicious. I now see through the bullshit of table grapes and don’t know if I’ll ever be able to enjoy them again.

-I also got to spend some time working in the winery usually because Scooter and myself were willing to stay late and help. The winery would be going long after the vineyard workers had gone home. The work I did wasn’t super exciting stuff, but I did learn a lot about the wine making process. Also every once in a while I would get to do something that was pretty cool, at least at first. Getting to spray a huge hose of wine is pretty fun, it felt like something off Wild and Crazy Kids (much love Omar Gooding). Also rolling wine barrels end over end is pretty sweet. That and sticking your head into fermenting wine tanks in a neat experience. It’s all CO2 and Alcohol fumes and it’s pretty intense. It’s also why if you fall in you stand a solid chance of dying. Not joking.

-Like a surprising number of the jobs I have had there was a fair bit of drinking on the job. There was always beer in the fridge in the winery and owner was liberal with it, no one got drunk but most late nights in the winery involved a couple beers. Apparently there is a popular saying in the industry, “a lot of beer goes into making wine.”

-Not that I didn’t drink wine too. A couple of times when we stayed the owner , Paddy, or the wine makers girlfriend would bring in dinner and there was always wine around to drink with it. They trade free bottles with other wineries so there was plenty of variety. During one dinner Paddy decided to crack open seven different bottles of Sauvignon Blanc for five of us. We didn’t even approach drinking them all, we just tried them all and compared. Just from drinking with them I’ve learned enough phrases to con people into thinking that I have a refined palate.

-The people were very interesting. Paddy, the wine maker Braydon, and the vineyard manager Ollie were all very nice people with plenty to teach and the willingness to do so. Some of the people I worked with in the vineyard along with some of the people I stayed with (at a place where Scooter has been living) were not quite as sweet. Honestly they were very much country bumpkin stereotypes, but lacked any sort of charm that might have endeared me to them. There seemed to be a universal interest in the fact that I liked to read as it was clearly not a common activity. When the subject of careers came up one of the women I worked with suggested that I should, “get a job with books,” whatever that meant.

-All and all it was a good experience for me in a lot of ways. I made enough money to get me through the rest of my time here. I learned a good deal about an industry I knew little about before. I gained enough experience that it I worked at a vineyard/winery again I would be a better position then before (something I am definitely considering) as well as a contact/reference for such a job that could be very useful.