Cellar Rat: Week Six at Unti Vineyards

By Ella Lawrence

Can it really be possible that harvest is nearly over? That now that I’ve finally gotten good at shoveling and only lose control of the hoses half the time, we’re only going to be getting grapes for another week or two?

Maybe some people at other wineries are looking forward to the end of harvest (probably in big-production cellars where they punch down or pump over eight times a day, sleep on cots next to the tanks and only do one task per rat, like fill barrels over and over again), but the thought of being done with cellar work at Unti fills me with sadness.

Working more than full-time has kept me out of trouble (for the most part) since I’ve been back home in Healdsburg, and doing hours on end of heavy manual labor daily has provided me with much more time to think that I would have ever expected. With my body completely occupied doing a difficult task that requires a lot of physical concentration, my mind is somehow completely calm.

What I’ve enjoyed the most about all of this manual labor is seeing the results--quickly. Working as a freelance writer, I’ve usually forgotten how it felt to write a story by the time it’s published weeks or months later. Making wine is like instant gratification: the grapes come in from the vineyards and we crush them, 3-4 days later they’re fermenting, and a week after that we’re barreling down the finished wine. We won’t really know how it’s going to turn out until it’s been aged properly, but there’s something so satisfying about seeing a process through from beginning to end.

While the end of harvest is bittersweet (it means I’ll have to face “real life” again instead of my charmed existence as a production worker at a groovy little boutique winery), there are a few upsides, one of them being the case of Domaine Tempier Bandol rose that Mick has already laid away for our end-of-harvest party. Come to think of
it, the end-of-harvest party circuit in this town is amazing. I haven’t been to one since I last worked at a winery here five years ago, but I seem to remember a group of attractive and tipsy Austrian interns stripping down to swim in a fountain.

Also, I will not miss the spiders. I’ve managed to avoid most of the treading so far, at least the original treading when the grapes come off the sorting table and into a tank that has someone jumping up and down at a furious pace, trying to get the juice out. By the time cold-soaking has started (cold-soaking is the time before the grapes start
to ferment, when they get punched down only once a day and get “tucked in” with their dry ice at night), I’m sure the spiders have drowned, but just yesterday there were four black widows and one brown recluse in the grenache we brought in.

I’ve gotten really fast at shoveling, the muscles in my arms have grown in proportion to the hoses I lift and the machinery I wrangle, I have developed calloused, purple man-hands, but I just can’t seem to overcome those spiders.

(Check back next Friday for the next installment of Ella Lawrence's Unti Vineyard Chronicles.)