At 6am on November 16th I was at the Wine and Grape Expo. In case you'd like to revisit the hilarity, here is the
video promoting the event.
This is what the trade show looks like at 6am. Creepy. Eerily quiet. Like that Stephen King Movie, The Langoliers where the entire airport has been deserted except for like 5 people. It was totally like that.
Like The Langoliers movie, The Wine and Grape Expo was at an airport, the Napa airport, which explains all the airplanes and winemaking equipment.
I made the mistake of thinking it would be, I don't know,
inside. I guess it was technically
inside the hangar, but the doors were wide open. It was freezing.
I, along with other volunteers were there early to help register and hand out name badges.
Which meant that I got to watch planes take off into the sunrise, so that was pretty cool.
By 9am my duties were done and I went to explore the show.
Here I am in a harvester. This is what they mean by machine vs hand picked fruit. Instead of a team of people in the vineyard cutting individual clusters off the vines, they can send in this behemoth.
Everyone who is remotely related to wine is at the trade show. This company makes tin capsules and metal wine labels.
Here we can see the size variations for the bottles from a capsule for a split to a magnum sparkling bottle.
These are the metal labels and embellishments for wine bottles.
I like the look of it, but I get the impression they are a pain in the butt to apply since it looks like they all have to be applied by hand. However that may not be a big deal since some companies apply the paper labels by hand too.
Besides packaging companies (glass, labels, foils, cork), there were also nurseries who sell young vines and are involved in viticulture.
Then there were companies selling lab instruments (my lab is all stocked up, thank you very much) and more serious equipment like this reverse osmosis machine.
These bags (also reverse osmosis) work for alcohol adjustments. If the alcohol level is lower than desired, they can take some water out and concentrate the wine. However ff the alcohol level is too high you can't just add water to dilute it, it will taste like you added water to wine.
Lunch break! Check out the awesome bird plane. So awesome!
In addition to the trade show (where we get to see what new products and technologies are available) there were several seminars (where we get our learn on).
A big part of getting our learn on involves getting our tasting on. It is extremely common to have wine samples to illustrate whatever the seminar is talking about.
New seminar topic . . . .
new wine samples.
I regret that November has been light on postings. It has been a combination of extreme busyness and extreme laziness.
I have high hopes for December. Although I will be out of the country for the second half of the month, so maybe not.
-L
