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...