One week down, no grapes yet.

We made it one week at Nobilo winery as cellar hands. This week we experienced all the "haphazardness" of any first week of work. No one knows what to do, everyone's giving 100% to try to not let anyone else down, and mistakes/accidents are plentiful. Both Jesse and I have avoided any major disasters, however some other coworkers haven't been so lucky. We've had a fellow coworker fall down a set of stairs and burn his foot with some caustic soda. Yikes!

At the end of the week, we celebrated a successful completion by sitting around drinking beers. Yes, I said beers. It's kind of ironic that a bunch of cellar hands and wine makers sit around drinking beers, isn't it? But I kind of understand this, after being around wine 24/7 (smelling, tasting, moving, spilling), the last thing you want to drink is wine when you're "relaxing".

So anyways, what did we learn this week?

First off, we learned how to make hoses. On and off this week, both Jesse and I cut large 3" diameter hoses to different lengths and put ends onto them. All in all, I think we made 10 hoses. When you put the ends onto the hose, you must use two hose clamps to secure the end. The tools required to do this job are both antiquated and terribly hard to handle, making the task much harder than it should be.

Next we learned how to pump out and clean a tank. Using a centrifugal pump which is difficult to prime, you can pump the wine from one tank (anywhere from 50,000L to 250,000L) to another. After removing the wine from a tank, it must be cleaned, expecially if the wine's been sitting in there for some time. To do this, you must rinse the tank with caustic soda, water, citric acid (to neutralize the caustic) and then water again. That's at least 4 rinses per tank. If the tank is extra dirty, the small mixing fans in the tank must also be cleaned. That's 4 more rinses per tank. All in all quite time consuming.

Since my specialty this vintage will be filtering wine, I did some work with different types of filters. Two of the filters use something called Diotomatious Earth (DE) which coats metal plates. Wine is drawn through these plates and the particulates in it stick to the DE. Dirty wine goes in, clean wine goes out. My favorite part of filtering is something called "tasting off". When you finish filtering a batch of wine, you have to then flush the machine with water. However, due to the length of hoses and pipes, you have quite a bit of wine left in the system. To loose this wine would be quite unprofitable, so you try to pump as much as possible into the tank, before it gets too watery. To do this, you must taste the wine that's going into the tank (with the help of a T-valve) and "determine" when it's too watery. When it gets too watery, you open the T-valve (closing off the receival tank) and let the water work it's way throughout the filter and hoses. Then you being to clean out the filter using the 4 step rinses described above. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, each filter machine has between 5 and 50,000 knobs, gauges and dials that must be turned in a specific order to ensure proper filtration. Turn the wrong one and you're liable to spray wine on your foot or worse.

One of the other filter that I have to run uses a centrifuge to spin wine at 6000 rpm. When the wine is spun up it gets dizzy and the particulates fall out (not quite). But particulates are trapped in a mesh and the wine goes through. When the particulate trap is full, the machine "ejects" the particulates with such a loud bang, it sounds like a howitzer is going off. The machine is actually reinforced in the area where the particulates are ejected from the centrifuge because of the force with which the particulates are ejected. I've taken to yelling "fire in the hole" to warn passer by's of the impending boom.

Next week, we'll get another 12 new employees with 6 coming to night shift with us. Rumor has it that the grapes are coming late next week, but again, that's just a rumor. Until then, we'll enjoy our 8 hour days and weekends off. Next weekend is Easter, so we'll have 4 days off (maybe).

Cheers,
~S