Arrival Story

John, an American who has expatriated himself in Adelaide with his Aussie wife Amy and baby boy, Jack, puts me up for a few days.  Despite their overwhelming hospitality, it’s a few days during which I grow increasingly worried.  I feel like I’m intruding, here, on John and his family.  And as if imposing myself on them for a night wasn’t intrusion enough, my stay has extended itself over the entire weekend.

Jetlag has actually worked strangely to my advantage, and I’m actually down by nine or ten in the evening, and up around six in the AM.

Up.  Up up up.  Up worrying.  Because, in the three days I’ve been in Adelaide, not one of my Australian contacts has come through.  Well, with the exception of John, of course.

Aerial of Adelaide, sighting down the wing of a
Singapore Airlines Airbus.

But, like I sed, all my other contacts… Kaput.  Lyn, the women who is ostensibly supposed to put me up in the Hills and whom Peter, the BnH winemaker, had instructed me to get in touch with upon my arrival, has not been picking up her cell phone (Mobile, they’re called here.  Not ‘mo-bill,’ like we Americans say; it’s ‘mo-bile.’).  Peter himself has likewise gone radio-silent, as has Mitch, who’s weirdly non-communicative for a guy in charge of “Communications” at Bird in Hand.  Even the Frenchie I’ve been exchanging emails with for the past month, Alwin, doesn’t answer his phone.

Needless to say: Yeah, I’m a bit worried.  I am freaking out, man.  I spend the normal operative business hours of the day placing phone calls and shooting off emails with growing panic, frustration and eventual desperation.

Do I actually have a place to stay at Lyn’s?  Do I actually have a job?  Was this whole thing a scam conducted by Australian immigration authorities in order to weasel me out of a $400 visa fee?  Yes, yes of course.  Damn.  Penal colony, remember?  Entire continent full of criminals, of course…

Then, small miracle on Sunday afternoon, and I do get in touch with Peter.

“You haven’t got a hold of Lyn?  Did you try leaving her a message?”

“Several.  Two today…”

“Alright.  Let me try and give you a call back in a minute.”

After a half hour of pacing, the De Michele phone rings, and John hands it to me.

“I don’t know what’s happened to Lyn, I can’t get in touch with her either.  Just show up at the cellar door tomorrow around nine-thirty or ten, and we’ll do induction and put you to work.  Worse comes to worst, you can sleep at my place for a night or two, until we sort something out.”

“Thanks, Peter.”

“Cheers, mate.”

So the next day Amy and Jack escort me out of the city on the M1 and later on the B34, freeways taking us right out and up into the Hills.  It doesn’t take us long to get out of Adelaide, which is fairly self-contained with minimal sprawl.

The Hills themselves are scraggly, mostly red rock with these sparse and struggling green patches, which is harsh yes, but it’s not quite Outback.

Amy and I chat for the half hour or forty-five minutes it takes to get out to Bird in Hand, and Jack nods off in the back seat.  Before too long, we’re passing vineyards, and I know we must be getting close.

We pull onto a little dirt road, with yellow signs with black outlines of kangaroos on them, reading “Next 5k,” and soon the BnH silos come into view.  In the little gravel parking lot we pull into, there’s a couple disentangling themselves from their car, obviously looking to start tasting even though the cellar door doesn’t open for another half hour.  I pull my gear from the trunk, tell Amy goodbye and thanks for everything, and set off to find someone who can tell me what I should do with myself.

First person I run into is an old and stooped groundskeeper, who mumbles and whom I follow around.  He leads me through the cellar, bigger than anything I’ve seen yet by far, and as we start running into people he mumbles at them “Peter?” and the other parties inevitably point us down the tank rows.  Eventually, we emerge from the far end of the cellar, cross a gravel lot where we must dodge an operating forklift, and then enter a doorway adjacent to a large barrel storage facility.

The groundskeeper nods me in, and then stalks off.  It’s obviously the winery’s lab, and everyone looks busy until someone gets off the phone and notices me.

“Hello, you must be Dan!”

“Daniel, yes sir.”

“Ah, they’ll be none of that ‘sir’ stuff around here, Dan!  Call me Mitch.”

We shake on it.  He’s a big guy, this Mitch.  Definitely one of those former athlete types, who’s bulk is getting a little loose in his middle age, but who looks as if he still plays ball or whatever it is he does on the weekends.  But Mitch is an extremely amicable fellow, broad and beaming.  He introduces me to Peter, the winemaker, who is wiry, a curt and seemingly high-strung man.  There are curt and seemingly high-strung introductions.  Then:  “Mitch, when is Greg supposed to get here?  We’ll have him and Dan do induction at the same time.  For now, give him  the tour and then have Wade find something for him to do.”

“Right-o.” (He actually says this, “Right-o.”) “Come on then Dan, I’ll show you around."

Mitch conducts our little tour through every part of the winery.  Tank room, barrel storage, tea room, case storage, cellar door (aka tasting room, you Yanks!), “the gallery,” events area, upper management offices, etc etc etc, ad naseam.

En route through the tank room I am introduced to John, a somewhat chubby and perhaps fratty kid a few years older than myself.  He looks kind of silly, holding a power washer and wearing a fluorescent yellow safety vest.  Friendly enough kid, though.

“Dan, this is John.  John, you’re living at Lyn Oborn’s as well, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I am.  So!  You’re our missing third roommate?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess I am.”  So, at least I am expected.

Mitch ditches me in the offices, where a tan and very pretty she-Aussie named Fiona takes charge of me.  Fiona is apparently the Jaclyn O'Brien/Meredith Wilson of Bird in Hand, and she takes me through the biznasty side of the operation, along with Greg, a middle-aged and insomniatic looking Australian chap.  This is somewhat tedious and redundant, and is mostly just the bureaucratic side of the company looking to cover ass.

The cellar.  This is maybe a quarter of the tank space at BnH.

Anyway, after I fill out the requisite paperwork, Greg and I are issued those same fluorescent yellow safety vests, which official policy insists is required to be worn at all times while practicality dictates this policy is almost universally ignored.  We are sent off into the cellar to find Wade, who will ostensibly give us work to do.

Messianic in every way, Wade is like the Australian answer to Jesus.  Or a winemaking Nikola Tesla.  Like Jesus, if Jesus was more strung out and wore a Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey cap.  First order of business, Wade shows me the dry ice maker, which is used to create a CO₂ buffer in tanks to ward of the oxidation of wine or juice.  We fill a bucket with the stuff, and Wade shows me the tanks that need dosing.

“Just chuck a few handfuls of snow in there.  Careful ya don’t hold on too long, you’ll get frostbite.” Then he looks at the handful of dry ice he’s holding.  Looks at it somewhat sadly, and somewhat proudly.  “Me hands are so mucked up, it doesn’t really matter.”

An admittedly ill-advised method, but whatever.  After I dose a few tanks, I notice my fingertips are really cold.  And, even when feeling does start creeping back into them, hours later, there’s a tingling I can’t quite shake.  Hmmm… Frost bite…  But, it’s alright, as the skin deadens and calluses over the next few days.  Harvest hands are coming sooner or later, and it’s probably best to leather up now.

But, it seems like Wade is just about out of busywork now, having been handing it out all day.  And no fruit has come in yet, to speak of.  Just a small amount of tempranillo, which I am both surprised and excited about.  All available resources have been diverted to cleaning the place and now, between there being too many cooks in the kitchen and the winery having reached an almost passable level of sanitation, there’s not much to do.

Things do begin to heat up towards the end of the shift, though.  It turns out a small amount of bottling needs doing, and I find myself thrown into the line, BnH having a permanent on-site bottling setup.  It’s a fluff job, but even so I can tell how slow and unaccustomed to using my hands I’ve become.

Man, have I gone soft?

But I get through till the end of my shift without mishap, and the bottling is good, helping me to get back into the swing of things, back to thinking like a cellar rat.

John offers to give me a ride home.  Or to what I at least hope will be home.  Having no real alternatives, I take him up.

John turns out to be a rather talkative type, assuming a domineering role in our conversations, although I’ve found in the past that I usually lend myself to this.  He’s a Fresno State kid, oenology, with a vintage in New Zealand under his belt, and three in Cali as a lab tech.  But, it’s me who gets his car started.

“Shit!  Not again.  This happened this morning, that’s why I was late.”  John pops the hood, and we get out to have a look.  “Know anything about cars?”

Long road home, as seen coming from Lobethal.

Almost nothing.  But, I come off looking like a minor savant, when:  “Well, there’s your problem right there.”  I push the positive cable back into place on the car’s battery.  John gives her a go and turns it over and, like magic, the car gets running.

I’d seen this problem before, on the zero-turn mower at SSH, and it’s perhaps the one mechanical problem I know how to fix.  But, I let John think I am more mechanically-minded than I actually am.

We drive into Charleston, a little northeast of the winery.  Charleston itself is less a town than it is an intersection, The Charleston Hotel (read as: pub) and The Book Post (combination book store, post office, general store and internet café) being the two defining features.  Lyn Oborn’s place is a gorgeous spread, mostly a horse farm in the rolling and sprawling and burnt golden Hills that the region is known for, though the Oborns keep chickens and a veggie patch as well.

No one is home, yet, and so John and I take a trip into Lobethal, the next town over, which has a fairly iconic bakery from which John is seeking to procure meat pies, and also a bank, at which I would like to put my personal affairs (or lack thereof) in order.

The car dies in the middle of a parking lot, we having taken a bump too hard, so John curses and pops the hood and I jump out and rewire the car, John starting back up long enough to finish his parking job.  We split up, agreeing to meet back at the car in a few minutes, and I walk the block to the Bank SA.

Well, no doing, banks here close at four PM on Mondays, which seems bizarre…  But, nothing I can do, just go another day without any accepted Aussie currency.  Back at the car, I watch a few Army types who congregate outside the shop where they'd just gotten barbecue.  They are weirdly non-intimidating, for being military types, and I wonder about the state of the Aussie army.

The homestead.

John comes back, having picked up a meat pie for me, too.  Curried chicken.  Well, I'd had a sneaking suspicion that my attempts at getting back on the vegetarian train, rekindled by the food at the Hoffmasters’, would soon be thwarted, here in Australia.  It is delicious.

Back at the farm, Lyn has arrived back home, as has her husband Peter.  John announces my arrival and, with incredible hospitality, Lyn assures me that I have a place to stay.  We set about, pulling a bed out of the garage to put in a spare and unused room.  It’s a bit spartan and not quite as comfortably cluttered as I like my rooms to be, but it will do, for this stint.

Just as we’re about to sit down for dinner, at which we’ve been joined by Lyn and Peter’s son Cooper - an equestrian rider and horse trainer- and James - whose relation here to the family I’m really not quite sure of, other than his status as “boarder” - a girl shows up.  Lauren is another coworker and tenant here, a pretty if tomboyish girl and another oenology student.  Cali Tech or Polytech or something.  Busy work had really run out on her shift, the evening shift, and she’d been sent home early, and joins us for eats: brats and burgers, chips (UK style), salad and fresh bread.

Anyway, we all sit down to dinner, and it’s actually quite a homey feel, here on the other side of the planet.