Wrapping up the vintage...

Following the long hours and sleepless nights, the winery continues to function at a steady pace, albeit slower, and not 24 hrs a day...

Working 8 hour shifts during the day (8-5) allows for a great deal of work to be done, especially when there are 15 people. Among the multitude of jobs that need completing on a daily basis are rackings, transfers, barreling down, additions, and most of all, cleaning. The winery, over the busy vintage period, became covered in sticky juice, messy yeast and yeast food, wine and grape skins...

There was very little time to do any cleaning over that period, so the few weeks following the harvest was spent heavily cleaning presses, floors, tanks, lines, hoses, and all the other bits and bobs that are used in the processing of the grapes and juice.



Racking is an important part of winemaking, to ensure that the wine that has fermented with the addition of the yeast is moved off the yeast that has become sediment at the bottom of the tank. This movement is carefully managed to ensure that the wine is at the correct level of fermentation.



Racking a 90,000 litre tank can take up to 3.5 hrs, whereas a 5,000 litre tank will take about 20 mins - half an hour. You pump the wine from a valve set just a little lower than the door, which is always above where the yeast lees settle. Once this valve has been reached, you open the door, attach a 'racking plate' to a hose and use this to suck the last of the wine, closely monitoring the level of the plate upon the lees. The lees are then discarded down the drain. The wine that has been moved into another tank will become clearer and clearer after each racking, and will be fined with varoius agents too.



Following the emptying of a tank in this way, it is essential to clean the empty tank, to remove the lees and the tartrates that have built up during fermentation.

Transferring wine is a very similar process to racking but there are no lees as the wine is finer and clearer.

There are obviously a number of saftey checks that one must carry out before and during the process of racking and transferring. One of the most important of these is very simple, but if not done, can lead to a terrible mishap. On one occasion I got the raw end of it... As with anything, if you are sucking out of a vessel, there must be a vent of sorts to allow the vessel to stay in its original state. Having checked the lid of the tank a few times, I was happy that it was all going well and went off to take my lunch break. Upon my return, the lid had blown or dropped shut, and the tank was imploding...



The roof had sucked down and the inside of the tank was also sucked in a little. In order to stop the implosion, I had to pry the lid of the tank open a little to allow some air in, then kick it as hard as i could to get the lid off. To repair the damage, when I was pumping another job into the same tank, I waited until the tank was 3/4 full and closed the lid firmly. Of course, with the volume of wine in the tank increasing, the pressure pushed the roof back up!



Barrelling has the same goals as racking, generally speaking. The aim is to move the wine from the lees to enable it to be fined and become clearer. Reds have been more commonly barreled, but it is done with whites, especially the pinot gris and chardonnay varieties. The process is a lot more fiddly than the racking, as the barrels are only 225 litres, and therefore fill very quickly, even when using a very small pump. Overflowing barrels is very common, as they fill so quickly, and occasionally there is foam that comes out very fast.

More pain and more sleeplessness...this time of a different kind!

Everyday during harvest, we are all supplied with pre-cooked meals. Generally, they are edible, but flavourless and hit and miss.

Last Saturday, we all had 'butter chicken', which caused an epidemic of food poisoning across the company. I think 75% of staff were ill, up all night running to the toilet for a variety of undescribable symptoms; well, they are describable, but i don't think this is the time or the place for those descriptions!

After 2hrs of proper sleep, a 12hr shift followed. Incorporating a loo stop every 15-30 mins means i probably worked 10 hrs, but hey, i was there at least!

With everyone having the same symptoms we are hopefully going to get the company supplying the meals into some proverbial shit themselves.



Suffice to say there have been a large number of meals left in the fridge every day this past week. I have been surviving on toasted sandwiches and cake all week. hopefully this week the food might get better...

Reds

Winding up the busy period of harvest leads us into quieter times, making for seemingly longer nights. The lack of pressure of the arrival of grapes every half hour makes it feel like you are working longer. Fortunately, I have been able get my hands well and truly stuck into some red wine making.



The process for the making of red wine is a much different and more labour intensive than that described previously for whites.

The grapes have usually come from the Mud House vineyards of the Central Otago area of NZ, which is about 6-8 hrs south of Marlborough. The grapes have tended to be hand picked, meaning that they are still in their bunches and therefore need de-stemming. This means hand-loading them into a crusher / destemmer machine, which then connects to a line taking the grapes into tanks. The tanks are smaller than the whites, with the largest being 20,000 litres. Avoiding using the presses that are used for whites, the skins and seeds of the reds are kept together with the pulp and juice, allowing for the colour, flavour and tannins to be kept.

The grapes are pumped into open tanks where they are left to sit on their skins and are manipulated 3 or 4 times a day. The most common of these methods is plunging, where the skins that have formed on the top of the tank are pushed down using extra long plungers to mix them back in with the juice below.





Another method of doing this is 'pumping over'; a hose is attached to the valve by the door of the tank and the juice and skins that sit at the bottom are pumped over the top to mix in with those on the top.



This process has taken place within the first few weeks of the grapes being in the tanks. After that the wine that has begun to ferment, and the skins are separated to allow the wine to ferment more. This is done by draining a tank. It's rather long winded, but you are constantly touching the grapes and i feel more of a connection to the process. You empty into a large bin the wine, filtering the skins into another bin, and pump the wine into an empty tank. The skins and seeds that are collected in the bin are gathered so they can be pressed to increase extraction.





Once the juice has stopped running freely, you have to open the door and scoop out all of the skins, seeds and mulch to add to the press. This is great fun, as you have to jump inside the wet, slippery, and most of all, potent tanks that depsite being open topped, are full of CO2 from the fermentation that has taken place already. It is essential that someone is outside monitoring your progress of the digging out of the tank to see that you've not passed out!





Once the tank is cleared of crap, you press the skins and collect more wine to pump into tanks or barrels (barreling down).

The wine that is kept in the tanks and barrels has the necessary additions and monitoring that the whites get, and are left to ferment for longer.

Pain and sleeplessness

The night shift is an interesting experience. One begins work at 7pm, which at this time of year is dark in NZ. You sleep during the day and only get the first few hours of sunlight before hitting the hay for 6 or so hours sleep...



There are about 15 of us working on the night shift, and as i mentioned earlier, being a 24 hour operation, the work is no easier or harder than the day shift. Saying that, working through the cold, often freezing nights, in a wind tunnel of huge tanks is not to be balked at. On top of this, you are constantly soaked. Whether it be juice, wine, or think clay-like additives, there is little chance of being dry and / or warm.

Below are a few of the parts of the winery work that i could do without:

Every cellarhand was issued a pair of gumboots (wellies i believe is their 'real' name) at the start of harvest, and they are practical, ensuring your feet do not get soaked and protect your trousers too. Unfortunately working for 12 hours with perhaps a half hour break, and the one and only opportunity to sit down and rest your legs, does not bode well for one's feet. The gumboots have no cushioning and your feet at the end of the shift feel like they could feasibly fall off, if you don't cut them off yourself in the delirium of fatigue and pain. Changing to my walking boots changed my working life. i could walk, run, dance (not that much) and stand without complaining in my head and to anyone that cared as to how much my feet hurt.



Cuts: now working in an environment where there is a lot of machinery and elements that require strength and hard labour is bound to leave one with small nicks and scrapes every now and then. I receive on average two cuts per night. These cuts begin as the smallest, insignificant injuries you could ever get. Give them the rest of the shift, not to mention the following however many weeks to come, and they turn into those sorts of cuts that will never heal, owing to the moisture that they live in. My hands are awash with open gashes and sores that i know i will be looking at for months to come!



The other night, a brazilian chap, who works on a machine called the RDV (Rotary Drum Vacuum), got the sleeve of his overall caught on a part of it and it twisted his arm round and round, leaving him with a broken wrist. The sound he let out as he cried for help (he was about 3 foot away from the emergency stop button) was one of the most harrowing noises i have ever heard. It sounded like a wounded lion, helplessly shrieking for its mate to come to the rescue. Fortunately, a number of us were not too far away and were able to stop the machine and cut him free from his overalls and send him off to hospital for medical attention.

Next post will be more jolly, i promise!

It's all part of the process...

The grapes arrive at the winery via huge trucks carrying anything between 5 and 15 tonnes. They drive up a small slipway to the receival bin, where the back of the truck opens up to release a huge waterfall of grapes. The grapes are all from different vineyards and some are huge blocks where others are small. One particular vineyard brought in 240 tonnes the other day to be processed, and it took pretty much 24 hours for them to be harvested, transported and processed to the tanks.



The grapes are slowly pushed out of the receival bin into a crusher where they are made slightly juicy but are still quite intact. The juice from the grapes is allotted to a particular tank, but to get it there, it is essential to press all of the juice out of the grapes. This is done in the press, where the cycle is around 3hrs to get a pretty much dry skin left inside the press. The juice is collected in a 600 litre metal tub and continuously pumped into the tank it is destined for.





Once the grapes are pressed the skins are discarded onto the back of a truck via conveyor belt. This pomace is used to make a low quality wine, by pressing it further. We do not do this ourselves...

There are a obviously a number of things that must take place to create wine once the juice is in a tank. There are additives, yeasts, more additives, sugar, etc, etc. There are analyses of each juice throughout the process and into the fermentation.

It is unimaginable how sticky one gets when processing such huge quantities of sugary juice. If you start to get tired, just take a sip of the juice out of the press and you'll have a sugar hit that will keep you going for at least and hour!

I am writing specifically about white wine here, in particular, Sauvignon Blanc. The reds to do not get processed in the same way. They do not get pressed, but are simply crushed, and left to sit on their skins. The red wine tanks are open topped and rather dangerous, as it is easy to fall in. If you did, it could quite easily kill you. It is essential to break through a cake of skins and fruit to circulate the juice and get as much skin contact as possible to allow the tannins, which are found in the skins, to give the body to the wine. Additions are made too, and fermentation happens in time.

The processes described above, are purely what happens through the first few weeks of a vintage. There are obvious elements that will take place over the next few weeks to a month, and the months to come, when the juice becomes wine. i am going to attempt to keep you posted of the progress that occurs, as and when it does...




Claudio, my fellow press fellow, from Sicily

Intro to Mud House

The first week at the winery was an interesting introduction to the world of winemaking. 8 hour shifts doing cleaning and preparing the huge factory of wine for the onslaught of grapes that was to come over the following 5 or 6 weeks. The winery consists of 11 presses, probably over 100 tanks ranging from 5000 litres to 90,000 litres and an easy 30 people to work the vintage. It sounds like a lot of people, but the place is huge and we are aiming to process 8,000 tonnes of grapes!



Having built shelves, painted rooms, cleaned tanks, re-cleaned tanks, scrubbed floors, hosed down everything 20 times without a grape in sight, the team was split into two teams - day and night crew. I was put in night crew. For a totally new experience for me, I figured there was very little difference between working for 12 hours at a time in the day or in the night.



Our first night of night shift began splitting us into smaller teams with responsibility for particular elements of the winery. Mine was the presses, or at least one side of the presses...

Getting there

Getting up early to get a bus from Christchurch to Blenheim, where I was to be staying for the next few months, I was taken aback by the scenery on the coastal road. I had visited NZ ten years earlier and was amazed at myself for not having remembered this beauty. I guess I was young and had other things to worry about, like getting drunk and going snowboarding etc etc..

I had arranged for accommodation through the winery at a place called the "Harvest House", and was rather anxious about what it was going be like. I knew that they had offered the same accommodation to the other people working vintage, but was it a hostel, with dormitories, and communal areas and the like? What were the people going to be like? How old were they going to be and etc etc?

I was running situations through my head and putting myself in uncomfortable environments: Sitting in a circle with everyone introducing themselves awkwardly, saying what their interests were and stuff like that...

I turned up at the house via a lift from a kind person from the winery, who was tasked with picking people up on a sunday and taking them to their accommodation. Within 5 minutes, I had met 10 or so people, from the US, Italy and France. After dumping my bags and surfboard in the room (a room big enough for one person comfortably, with five beds - kids bunk beds - my worst fear realised!), I headed out on a bike ride with the people that i'd just met to go tasting at some wineries around the area. We visited 5 or so vineyards, where we tasted lots of wines, mainly sauvignon blanc, as it is the most highly produced in this region.

Getting to know the individuals that I would be working alongside was easy and everyone was so friendly and eager to make a good impression. For a few weeks we all ate, lived and slept in the very close quarters, while working what I thought were really nice shifts throughout the days...

From IT specialist to cellarhand - why?

Having studied and worked in the business of IT and Communications for a good 6 years, I made a drastic decision to change my life by finding something that would enable me to learn a skill. Something manual and scientific. Over the years I have improved my soft skills tenfold, but I have never actually got my teeth stuck into something that I actually wanted to master. Surfing of course has been a long and slow process of learning a skill, but I can say for sure that I will never be able to make a living out of it.

I was looking for years for something that I thought would fulfil me, and give me the opportunity to spend time outside, rather than in an office, getting my hands dirty and working with nature. I found a degree at a local college to where I was living in Brighton, which gives students two years of understanding how wine is made and produced. I was sold on the idea as soon as I read the course description. Being slightly wary of the way that higher education is 'sold' to prospective students via websites and booklets (a previous MA in Digital Culture and Technology soured the taste of that), I decided to head up to the college and meet with the teachers and take a short course in vineyard management. I was enthralled by the details and the science that went into something so alien to me... and I was hooked!

I quit my job and managed to find a placement for vintage in a winery in the Marlborough region of New Zealand.

After a short stopover with some old friends in Australia, I headed over to NZ to start work...