“Oh, you make wine?! How much fun is that!?”
The cafe speaker was a young woman awestruck to find out that one of the people at the next table made the wine she was sipping. In her delight, she may have missed the glazed look in the eyes of the winemaker.
I suspect he was thinking, “If she only knew ...”
As the 2024 harvest in northern California begins, some people think winemakers’ work is fun. But as we said in a recent wine column, making wine is a 12-month job that deals with a huge number of boring details.
And most of it starts and ends with scrubbing.
Vineyards are a menagerie. Flying insects, crawling insects, voles, birds, and microbes can affect the grapevine. Below-ground pests, such as root lice, gophers, and mice, and above-ground pests like wild turkeys and boars all must be dealt with.
Viticultural decisions like pest management and irrigation systems are some of the disciplines taught in winemaking schools.
Some winemakers are blessed enough to have salaried positions where they have fewer duties—other than dealing with workers hired to do all the dirty work. But even then, they have to monitor the work of cellar crews to make certain everything is clean.
Other winemakers who own their own brands have it worse: staffs they have to manage and pay, overhead costs, dealing with tasting rooms, including such mundane tasks as dealing with spit buckets, restroom maintenance, and government compliance on dozens of health issues that didn’t exist a few years ago.
Perhaps the most footloose of all winemakers are the outside consultants who are hired to make wine for brand owners. They have many fewer responsibilities—but also much lower income.
All winemakers have to deal with grape growers. Since the disciplines are not really compatible, this can entail a lot of frustrations on both sides. The grape grower and the winemaker must coordinate their efforts to keep everything spotless.
Sanitation is the one constant in the lives of all winemakers. Growing grapes and making wine are both remarkably grimy occupations that call for attention to details that go down to microbial levels.
Occasionally, a newly hired winery worker doesn’t understand the necessity for intense sanitation. I have seen winemakers go ballistic when a cleanup task is done casually.
The universal mandate is to keep the winery and all equipment operation-room immaculate. Nothing can ruin a wine faster than a tiny bit of spoilage. An entire year can be wrecked by a failure to keep everything free of microbes.
None of this is romantic. Indeed, little of the winemaking process is. The best part of it may well be pulling the cork—which is what the young woman in that cafe was experiencing.
The reality is that making wine is no stroll in the park.
