When you stroll through the vineyards of Napa Valley and glance at the picturesque photos adorning the walls of the wood beamed tasting rooms it is logical to surmise this industry is steeped in romance and luxury. Grapes gently picked and tossed into wicker baskets, placed softly into a basin and stomped gleefully by a group of young ladies ala the 1995 feature film A Walk in the Clouds. This movie was certainly my first exposure to the grape harvest - beauty, struggle, family, grace under fire, Keanu Reeves. Perhaps you saw that I Love Lucy episode first? Well, regardless, making wine looks fun or beautiful or both.

I’m at the start of harvest, so I angrily want to thrash that mirage apart and put my sore muscles and anxiety on display as a form of catharsis. Yesterday I went up to check my furthest but most breathtaking vineyard, Shake Ridge Ranch. The viticulturalist there is a witchy magician at her core. She explained to me yesterday how she makes notoriously impossible zinfandel behave and form uniform clusters and I’m still scratching my head. Anyway, I digress, what I want to talk about is how I loaded the grape bins.

You have to store your large unwieldy ½ ton food grade plastic pick bins (not wicker baskets, sorry, this is the first blow) somewhere. So you ask a kind viticulturalist to please let you push them to the side of one of their vineyards until you need them again next year. I come to pick them up to prepare for harvest. I bring them down to my grape processing facility and clean them out and drive them to my first white grape pick. That is all in theory, this is how it actually went down.

Shake Ridge Ranch

Driving through the vineyard

I borrowed my friend, David Mahaffey’s, (you may know him 😉) trailer. This trailer has seen a lot. It has one light with the cover smashed out. The license plate is held by one screw. The bottom is made of wood with an uneven piece of plywood covering up holes in rotted wood. But due to his generosity, it’s free, so I use it.

I took it up to Shake Ridge. It’s a 2 and half hour drive. I do the grape checks and some nice vineyard workers loaded my bins on the trailer. This is where the fun begins. They leave; me and a friend of mine are the only ones around. The grape bins are not pushed to the back of trailer where there is a bar for them to rest on. They are sitting in middle of the trailer. If tied down that way, they would shimmy around and topple off the side of the trailer probably endangering someone, possibly killing them. Knowing this I go to push the bins to the back of the trailer. Brute force doesn’t cut it, its 600 lbs of grape bins I’m trying to push across an uneven wood floor and half of the grape bins are stuck on that rogue piece of plywood. I go to grab a forklift, the keys are missing. I call the viticulturalist for the keys, no one answers. I decide I must use the tie down straps to pull the grape bins forward. So over the course of an hour I inch the grape bins forward by securing the straps to the sides of the trailer and cranking the straps tighter and tighter, which does successfully move the grape bins an inch at a time.

I finish moving the grape bins to the secure position on the trailer and then go to tie them down. My straps aren’t quite long enough to clear the top of them, I have forgotten that I usually truck grape bins 2 bins high, not 3. I attach more straps together, using all the straps I have and start to move out. Just as we’re getting in the truck, the vineyard workers show up, so I ask to borrow two more straps just to be sure. Then I ask my friend to check out the brake lights, remembering they were finicky last year. The break lights are not engaging.

So we make it down the hill above Sutter’s Creek with my heart racing and my hazards on, hoping someone will see my truck lights beyond my grape bins. My friend and I determine we can get most of the way back to Napa on smaller highways and side roads, taking a circuitous route through Northern California to avoid cops and deadly accidents. We get back before dark. Today I dropped off the grape bins and took the trailer back to David alerting him the brake lights are again on the fritz.

My muscles are still sore. I can’t focus as well today; I’ve had too much adrenaline for too long. And this is only the grape bins.

This is harvest. When I first started in the industry the winemaker I was working under with The Prisoner warned me that anything I had not done at the winery previously could potentially kill me. I thought he was being facetious at the time but in retrospect it’s not bad advice at all.

If you get in the way of the forklift, possible death. If you fall into a fermenting tank that is exploding with CO2 gas, likely death. Every year someone dies in one of these horrifying accidents that play out in the wine industries’ collective conscience. Barrel racks fall on you. A barrel falls on you. Some vineyard equipment malfunctions. There are thousands of ways to die in this business. Now I can’t stop thinking about the wine version of the movie A Million Ways to Die in the West (which was an underrated fun romp).

Apart from film references, it really is dangerous. You hear the stories of historic wine industry folk like Bo Barrett or Louis Martini or Andre Tchelichev borrowing each other’s equipment last minute and coming together as a community to make a great wine. This still happens today but they rarely talk about the forklift and trailer mishaps that occur in the midst of that kumbaya moment.

When I got my first job in wine I started work on a Monday. By Wednesday I went to Target and bought a pack of men’s tee shirts and identical sports bras and jeans from the goodwill because I realized - I just need the same clothes every day that can get dirty. My jeans are covered in grape sugar, my shirt is decorated in dirt due to some piece of equipment I had to carry or lean on or use, my socks are somehow wet inside of waterproof boots.

I do love the all-encompassing nature of harvest. You’re hard pressed to think about anything else for that time period. You just keep putting one foot in front of the other to solve problem after problem until your wine is made. There is no real glory moment. On the last day I usually lie down and promptly get some sort of cold that’s been festering in my immune system. I got some medals in the mail for my wine a couple weeks ago. Like actual medals. I haven’t gotten anything like that since High School swim team. Maybe I’ll tie them to my rearview mirror to remind me of that occasional payoff. Probably better to just drink the wine.

The Ugly, Painful Grittiness of the Grape Harvest

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