Row, Row, Row Your Boat

I got an email today from a fellow wine buddy commiserating about our harvest schedules.  

This morning (2am) I received another message from another buddy who was still at work, renouncing his previously "civilized" work hours.  Regardless of how under control and well staffed other wineries were, this rain really sent everyone into high gear.  Even if your winery wasn't busy before the rain, this week everyone raked in the overtime.

  Unless you are salaried, and then, sucks to be you.

Fruit to the left                  and                fruit to the right.

We pulled in everything save for 3 vineyards that we will have to pick next week.  You don't pick in the rain, and you don't pick immediately after the rain.  You have to wait a bit to let the grapes dry out.  This isn't great, but it's what happens sometimes.  We called in an extra crew so that we could work double how crazy hard we were already working, and even then, running around the clock, in our facility we just could not process the fruit as fast as we needed to.  So the fruit will have to wait out the rain.  

This means that after the crazyness of the past several week, we have several days of respite.  This should by no means be interpreted as a break from our demanding hours, there is still plenty to do with the grapes that did make it in before the rain, but we will not be harvesting for a while.  

And therefore the official end of harvest is still pending.  

Which I have mixed feelings about.

My friend's email was titled "All at Sea", which is already a most appropriate metaphor for the long voyage that is harvest, but was made more poignant by the appearance of the recent rains.  

I do feel like we are all at sea, or rather, at harvest.  Like harvest is a place rather than a time period.  It can be so encompassing that I feel like we are in a different place altogether.  

Normal life gets put on hold, doctor/dentist appointments, haircuts, birthdays, most everything that can absolutely be put off, does.  

Two notable exceptions have been: the birth of children and parole hearings.    

Quick side note: both our winemaker and our sister winery's winemaker have had babies this past week.  I guess one each isn't so bad, there is the urban legend about the winemaker who had triplets during harvest.  Which is actually a true story, I know the guy.  

But babies now?  

I cannot stress the poor timing enough.  

In the industry there is a widely accepted practice of calling the spouses of harvest workers 'harvest widows'.  I've always found it morbid how casually everyone uses it, but it's very apt at painting a picture of the situation.  The "widow" wives get together in mock support groups and keep each other company this time of year.  

I wanted to interview one, see what it was like from the other side.  But it's harvest and who has time for an interview, (not me).  But I really wanted to do it, so I tried to persuade T to pretend to be a harvest widow so that I could interview him and save time, but he wasn't having it.  So you can thank him for depriving us of valuable insight into the life of a harvest widow.

Anyway,

I have some great footage I am excited about putting together (including some of me doing a punchdown which is hilarious) but it's not ready yet.  I do have a quick mash up of the foggy Napa mornings, then Frankie found a bird in our cave and he brought him to me.  The guys know my strict 'if you find an animal in the winery bring it to me' policy.  

The last part of the video is me taking footage to show a group of tourists coming to watch us work.  (Do people come to watch you work? I think this is weird)  They do this all the time, especially during harvest because there is more to see.  Whenever they come I feel like we are zoo animals and they are waiting for us to do something interesting so they can take our picture.  So I've taken to filming/taking their picture back.  It's so obnoxious and I would love to rant about it, but it's late and I have to be at work early tomorrow, so I will table that rant.

 

 Special Shout Outs:

To my baby sis who's 10th bday I missed this week,

I'm sorry I couldn't be there baby!

To my BFF for being such a smarty pants and getting to do science with Laura Kiessling. 

Yay for lady scientists.

To Z for staying on the phone with me on my late night drives home from the winery,
making sure I don't fall asleep at the wheel and drive into the vineyards.

To T for being the best special lab intern of all time.  

Of All Time.

And of course,
To my fellow sailors on the USS Harvest,

we're almost home boys.

-L