Paralyzing Boredom and, then: First Big Crush

            Our first week is slow, no fruit to speak of having come in just yet and the initial blitz of sanitation having been largely accomplished.  I get put on the afternoon shift, which is loosely and almost understandably vernacularized as the “arvo” shift.

On my shift are two Indians, with whom I often solicit a ride to and from work.  The first, Karan is a well-spoken and friendly young man, a former financial analyst whose job drove him quite literally to drink, and thus read Hugh Johnson and Janice Robinson.  Eventually, he picked up and left India for a Kiwi cellar hand gig, and then Sonoma.  And now, of course, the Adelaide Hills.  The other Indian, Shri, is a bit more enigmatic.  There’s more of a language barrier here, and the first time we exchange any words he just yells at me, through thick Indian accent, about having worked in Napa.  He is a good guy though, and as I come to know him better he often - only half-jokingly, I think - asks me to take him to the pub, or wherever “all the girls are.”

Also on my shift are two Australians.  Ali is only on part-time, being also a fulltime Uni student studying Wine Marketing in Adelaide and having a weekend job at the cellar door at The Lane.  She’s fresh off a two-year cellar door management position in New Zealand, where she’s shacked up with a Frenchie who’s family owns vineyards in southern France, which she and he plan on taking over and settling down on.  The other Aussie, Nick, is thoroughly and masculinely Australian.  A bit older chap, he’d worked a vintage back in the ‘90s, and is undertaking this vintage right before throwing himself into the launch of a distribution business, focusing on small scale Australian wineries, and also breweries and cider producers.  He enjoys a healthy antagonism with Shri, which starts out as an almost racially charged thing, but which morphs into this sort of offbeat friendship by the end of the first week.

We work from three in the afternoon until eleven at night, when graveyard takes over.  The first half of our shift is overseen by Wade, already met.  Peter is also around, the high-strung little winemaker who is a holy terror, and recalls me that quote from A Christmas Story.  “In the heat of battle, Peter wove a tapestry of obscenities.”

Chewie!  ("WHAT A WOOKIE!")

However, the second half of the shift, as night comes on, takes a decidedly more laidback feel.  Dylan (or, more often, “Dylo!”) the assistant winemaker, barely in his thirties, takes over for Peter and is mostly content to keep to the lab and run sulfur, acid and carbon trials on various wines.  Wade is relieved by a guy named, and I’m not kidding, Chewie.  Chewie reminds me of an Australian Scott Spelbring, with a voice and cheerful disposition that any American, their exposure to Australian culture and people being limited to Crocodile Dundee and commercials for Foster’s and The Outback Steakhouse, would find immediate comfort and recognition in.

But, the first week is slow.  We find ourselves custodians of the installation, and not much happens outside of some petty squabbling about who gets to do the single nighttime pumpover, and these mop-up tank cleaning jobs.  Mostly, it’s just to get us into the habit of sanitation, so crucial in this business.

And the habit is as follows:  Everything at the winery, before use, is hit with the standard three-pronged sanitation regimen.  First you set up your mono pump, which is the basic workhorse for wine movements, with the suction end drawing water from a 55-gallon drum.  The push end of the pump gets stuck down into the opening at the top of the tank, and is outfitted with a shower ball attachment.  Then, someone fetches caustic.

(Two notes here, on caustic.  One from each of the cellar masters.  From Wade: “Be careful not to get any of this shit on you.  You splash some on yourself, and you won’t feel anything for about fifteen minutes.  Then, you’ll feel a burning like someone’s just stuck a lit cigarette into your skin.  And then it’s too late to get it off.  It burns you up from the inside, like.”

And then, from Chewie, to Karan:  “You need to be wearing some goggles, mate.  (Turning to me) Especially you Americans.  Don’t know what it is about you blokes, but last two vintages it was one of the yanks that got caustic in his eye.  Last year the feller did a right good job of it, too.  Ended up melting his eyeball, like.  Burned all the color out of his eye.  He ended up being alright, didn’t lose his sight or anything, but had to wear an eye patch for six months with this special jelly on the inside, help it grow back.  He did a proper bang up job, alright.  But still…  Nasty shit.”

But still…  Nasty shit.)

So, someone fetches caustic, suited up with rubber gloves and a face shield and/or goggles.  Said person is dispatched to this big, thousand-liter tub sitting outside, forcing open the valve that always sticks and sends caustic gushing and splashing into your 5-gallon bucket.

The caustic gets dumped into the barrel of water, and the whole lot gets sucked up by the mono pump, dosing the inside of the tank and killing anything living in there and melting any tartaric acid that might have built up.  Once the 55-gallon barrel is drained, you attach the suck-end of the hose to the bottom valve of the tank, and cycle the caustic through for a few minutes.

One must be careful when executing this procedure.  The shower ball ends have a tendency to want to try and back the hose out of the tank and spray skin-melting caustic all over everything.  I saw this happen, once, when Nick hadn’t properly secured a hose, and only a quickly killed pump and the fact she was wearing her protective gear saved Ali’s otherwise pretty face.

Anyway, once your caustic gets cycled through and drained from the tank, you do a quick flush of the system with a course of water, then repeat the process with citric acid, which is actually quite mild, especially compared to the caustic, and is oftentimes used to clean wine stains from one’s hands.  The citric neutralizes any remaining caustic and, once drained and the tank is flushed again with water, the vessel is good to go, ready to receive wine.

We do this a lot, in the build-up to harvest, there being somewhere between eighty and ninety tanks in the cellar, and these not always in a logical, numerical order.  Boredom sets in and then, worse, crypticism.  Notes, designating cleanliness and left on the tanks, progress from such officious messages as “Cleaned: 1/3” to the more informal “C+C (for Citric and Caustic) 3/3” to the playful “Chipper,” “She’s Apples,” and “Right-o.”  Eventually, the notes take an offensive (“Cleaner Than Your Mother”) and even ominous (“Nuked 7/3”) tone.

This tank is unclean.

Everyone’s itching for it, the action, like in those old war movies.  Hey Sarge, when’re we gonna see some action, huh?  Everyone is tired of the waiting.  Everyone wants to be in… the shit.

And for a week, we barely miss it.  It’s early enough in the season that there’s no rush to get anything off of the vine, and the pickers can wait until nightfall to harvest, when the grapes are cooler.  We prep the crush pad and the presses for grapes  coming in an hour after we get off, and getting crushed by the graveyard shift.  As things start getting busier, crushing ostensibly bleeds into our shift.  But, fruit that’s supposed to come in at nine PM doesn’t show before we knock off, and when we show for the next shift the day after, it’s to a press that’s just finished its cycle and a crush pad that’s been left wrecked.  These are accompanied by rumors, too, about the night shift and these marathon crushes, forty tons at a time.

And we get stuck on clean up.

But, it’s not long before harvest catches up with us and, one night, Chewie sets us in motion, prepping gear.

“They’re just out picking now, we’ll have fruit in about half an hour or so.  So, ah, Daniel.  You’ve done a bit of crushing before then, have you?”

I answer in the affirmative.

“Ah!  Very well then!  So I’ll just show you the setup here, then…”

The setup here is slick.  Tonight, fruit is coming in on “gondies.”  (Chewie: “They’re called ‘gondolas’ and, I don’t know why, we just shortened it to ‘gondies.’”  It’s that Australian penchant for slang and abbreviation.)  The gondies, these big, dumpable buckets attached to the back of the tractors and capable of holding upwards of three tons of fruit, follow the mechanical harvesters through the vineyards, receiving the picked fruit.  Once full, or else once the mechanized harvester finishes a row, the gondie comes back to the crush pad, dumping its payload into a seven-ton combination hopper and weigh-bridge.  Fruit is weighed and recorded, and the auger built into the hopper moves it along towards the crusher.

Via method of a trapdoor, fruit is dropped from the hopper to the crusher, and then into the pump that pushes the grape must from the crush pad and through a chilling system and into the press or, in the case of reds that need maceration, into a stainless steel tank for fermentation on the skins.

This trapdoor business is a bit tricky, it turns out.  Due to the downward slope at which the hopper angles the fruit towards the trapdoor, and due to the amount that the mechanical harvesters beat up the fruit, free running juice has a tendency to accumulate at the end of the hopper, right above the trapdoor.  And, when said trapdoor is imprudently opened, there is a very real risk of a veritable dumping of juice.

“I’m not kidding mate, it’s like a tidal wave!  Just Whoosh and you’ve got juice everywhere and Ruchie (Peter Ruchs, the winemaker) cursing up a storm, up to your ankles in juice and grapes you’ve got to clean up and all of it down the drain…”

And it turn out that this would happen, a few nights later on the graveyard shift as Aldwin, one of our Frenchies, opens the trapdoor and half a ton of Savi comes pouring down, actually tipping over what turns out to be a very poorly balanced and unstable crusher/destemmer.  The onslaught of grapes occurs, unabated, until someone manages to slam shut the trapdoor.  And then there’s a frenzied cleanup, as the crew tries to clear the crush pad enough to make it operable again so as to continue crushing, as more gondies and more grapes arrive...

(A note here, on the crush pad:  It is less a crush pad, per se, than it is a crush pit.  Due to the necessarily elevated hopper in relation to the crusher/destemmer, the crusher and its operator are actually sunk into the ground, about eight to ten feet.  The walls and flooring are concrete, and there are various hoses for must and half-ton T-bins for collecting the MOG (Matter Other than Grapes) spat out by the destemmer.  But the worst part about the crush pit is, by far, some sort of catastrophic infrastructural drainage problem.  Runoff water and juice merely collects in the back of the pit, rises like the tide until it’s ankle level and someone, feet wet, notices and does something about it.  Well, it turns out that “doing something about it” means scaling the walls of the pit, usually with the aid of an upturned bucket or cinder block, specifically placed there for this purpose, and activating an old an derelict centrifugal pump that’s been permanently located at the top of the pit, and which only runs in reverse.  Activating said pump will drain the pump, but at the expense of temporarily flooding the refuse water into the winery proper, where there is at least adequate drainage, but which leaves all the other cellar rats standing in swamp water for a few minutes.  Anyway…)

So, Chewie has me man the pit, leaving me straddling the crusher in such a way as to either counterbalance any tipping that might occur or, in the case of a very serious dumping of grapes that will tip the crusher anyway, will send me catapulting into a cement wall.  This position also puts me within easy reach of the hopper controls, including the trapdoor mechanism.

The first gondie arrives with a typical load of 2.05 tons of grapes.  Semillon.  And, we get underway.  Trick to operating the trapdoor without flooding the place, it turns out, is to open a valve that drains off the excess juice from the hopper into the crusher in a controlled manner.  Then, the trapdoor is opened and slammed shut, in increasingly larger increments, allowing any grapes sitting on the trapdoor to be cleared in a safe manner, and the fruit and juice is coming in slow and steady enough to leave the door wide open.  At this point the operator can dictate the flow of fruit by controlling the auger speed.

We only see a few tons that night, eight or ten, before the night shift comes in to relieve us.  But, it’s good to get a feel of the operation, and also a taste of the hectic life of harvest.  It serves as a good adjustment; away from the paralyzing boredom of our first week and towards the madness of the upcoming crush.