What I learned working at a winery during a wildfire and global pandemic
In the first quarter of 2020 I was hit by a global pandemic, got married, and was laid off. I wanted to match this whiplash of circumstances to capitalize on this unusual opportunity for personal growth. That’s why I decided to realize a bucket list dream to learn the art of winemaking. I’ve spent the last few months working at Testarossa Winery in Los Gatos helping to create the 2020 vintage.
While I wasn’t a typical candidate for this position coming from a dozen years in politics and tech, I have developed a personal passion for wine since I moved to California in 2014. For a trivia-head like me, it’s a perfect combination of geography, culture, science, and sensory experience that always leaves me hungry (thirsty?) to learn more. Plus, I figured the pandemic was a great opportunity to do something out of my comfort zone that I may not have had the courage to try in normal circumstances.
Here’s what I learned during my time in winemaking:
- Making a finished product takes a village.
Wine is by nature a cyclical business, one that flows from the seasonal entrance of the vineyard crop to the exit of a finished bottle, often years later. Between those events are a complex process of chemistry, maintenance, and timing that is as much art as it is science.
By the time a glass or bottle of wine reaches your mouth it has been impacted by countless variables. When were the grapes harvested? What were the steps the winemakers took during the harvest and fermentation process to ensure the best possible outcome? Did the wine interact with new or used oak, stainless steel, or some other vessel? Was the wine maintained with the proper processes and limited exposure to oxygen?
Each of these steps includes the judgments and continuous labor of many people. At each step there is the possibility of error or accident that could ruin the entire chain of events that lead to a finished product. At first I found this incredibly daunting. I learned to do my work deliberately, careful to honor the work that had gone into the wine I was working with up to that point.
Overlaid over these challenges were the particulars of this vintage, one that will likely be remembered in California as one of the most difficult in living memory. In August, a series of fluke weather events and heat waves combined to create forest fires that burned the area of the Santa Cruz Mountains around our winery and throughout California, filling the air with noxious smoke right at the time when grapes would normally be harvested. As a result, our harvest was dramatically reduced due to the potential taint from smoke on the grape skins. We took special steps to isolate any lots that we suspected could be impacted and cleaned our equipment thoroughly before and after interacting with it. Even though our winery was diversified enough in it’s sourcing, that is still a hit to the bottom line. Many wineries and vineyards were either destroyed or damage by these fires, which are being exacerbated by climate change. This is another financial hardship small wineries will have to deal with on top of the impacts of COVID.
2. Quality In, Quality Out
My favorite task at the winery was working the sorting table because you got to see the fruit at the beginning of its journey to becoming wine.
We sorted out unappealing bunches as well as material other than grapes (MOG) like leaves, stems, and other things that shouldn’t go into the ferment. (My co-worker found a pair of garden shears; a few years ago they found a cell phone.) I got a chance to taste the fruit and start to understand some of the unique characteristics that led to differences in wine between both different grapes and different regions. My biggest takeaway here was that quality wine starts with quality fruit. It was immediately obvious which fruit came from our most prized sites. No matter how talented the winemaker, you can’t turn bad fruit into good wine.
3. The magic of fermentation can only happen with a dedication to sanitation and hygiene, especially during a pandemic.
Wearing a mask all day can be a grind, especially when you are doing physical activity. While I was often indoors, most of my tasks were largely solo in cellars and we all took care to maintain social distance when working together. While it wasn’t the most comfortable thing, it was a small price to pay for keeping myself and my co-workers healthy.
I also felt safe due to the percentage of our work that involved cleaning. Because wine is a living thing and a food product, it requires everything to be completely sanitized to prevent the introduction of unwanted microorganisms. Only certain items can touch the juice or other items that touch juice, and those items can never touch the floor or be left out after use. Before and after touching the wine, each hose, valve, and part needed to be cleaned. For every hour of winemaking, you spend 3 hours cleaning.
Fermentation is an active chemical process, and when you have several 100+ tons of fermenting grape juice in an indoor space, you need ventilation. Regular CO2 monitoring was a daily precaution, and on some days you could really tell that yeast was cookin’.
We helped it along with daily pump overs and punch downs to ensure an even process.
The building that houses Testarossa has been producing wine since 1880. It’s crazy to think about doing this work without electricity, pumps or machinery to move the wine. Built on a hillside, they relied mostly on gravity and elbow grease to do the hard work. It must have required an additional level of creativity.
4. Against all odds I became a “morning person.”
I started work most days by 6 am. That meant I went to work in the dark and was well into my day before most people get up. Before this experience, I thought of early risers as a separate species. I usually get my best work done in the afternoon and my best thinking at night. When I had a desk job, I’d wake up in the morning and scan my inbox for messages from the morning people I worked with. While it was never easy to drag myself out of bed at 5am, I learned to love the sunrises at the winery as the days grew shorter.
I got a very satisfying feeling of accomplishment when I finished work in the early afternoon and had the rest of my day to do whatever I wanted. I went to bed early and cut out a lot of less-useful time I was otherwise spending watching TV or on the internet.
I hope this is an aspect of this experience that carries into the rest of my life.
5. With a dose of humility and hard work I can learn to do well in a new industry in a short amount of time.
In the end, I probably worked harder physically than I have in my entire career. Winemaking is a tough job, and the people who do it rightly have a lot of pride in the hard work they put into it. It took a lot of humility on my part to go into a situation where I knew very little and commit to learning new tasks every day. I left feeling much handier with tools and with the ability to think logically through a mechanical process.
The ability to more or less completely leave my work at the door each day was a blessing. The time I spent in front of a screen went down dramatically and I found it incredibly helpful for my mental health. This translated into better sleep, better mood, and more mental space for myself.
It’s calming to know that despite all the hardships that will define 2020, the sun still came up, grapes grew, and the vintage was made. Life goes on and in the long run the Earth will continue to provide these gifts for us if we take good care of it.
The future will tell whether I continue in wine professionally or just become a garage winery hobbyist, but I now have a first-hand knowledge of how this beautiful product gets made!
