And just like that, harvest is over. It’s almost Thanksgiving and I just finished my last day at the winery. Over the past week things have been slow. VERY slow. We have cleaned and recleaned all the tanks, we mop the floors at least twice a day, and in general have to try really hard to find things to do. The wine still needs some attention, but it’s only a couple hours of work every few days, so they don’t need me anymore. That’s fine with me; I can’t wait to go home to celebrate my mom’s birthday and Thanksgiving!
These past few months have been quite the experience. I learned so much about making wine and the wine industry overall. I’m so grateful that I had this opportunity. I’m also grateful that I was able to make the decision to go after this crazy experience, leaving a nice cushy job behind. I feel like I can do anything now! That is a great feeling, but it’s also overwhelming to have so many options and so many things I want to try!
I think a little reflection is always good though. Hopefully this will help me sort through my options and decide what to pursue next, and maybe even help someone who wants to try working at a winery for the first time and has no idea what to expect.
There were a lot of great things about working at a winery that made me really glad I did it.
I got to meet a lot of new and different people who I never would have met otherwise. People have a lot of different reasons for working in wine. They can come from a totally different field, following their passion like my fellow intern and myself. They can be someone who has studied wine and comes from an academic background. They can be someone who works harvests and does other things during the rest of the year. It was a great chance to meet people with different perspectives, which was a change from my previous job where I felt like I was surrounded by a lot of people on a similar path.
I got to taste a lot of wine! Being in a wine region means there were endless opportunities to go taste wines from other wineries, which is a great opportunity to learn about other wines made in the same region. I was tasting wines made from grapes grown in the same climate and soil but produced using drastically different winemaking techniques and styles. I also got to taste a lot of wine at the winery where I was working. It was cool to taste it throughout the fermentation process, and I’m looking forward to trying it once it has been bottled!
Speaking of the fermentation process, I also learned a lot about the actual process of making wine. I worked at a relatively small winery where we processed just over 100 tons of grapes. That is a very specific experience, and would be different from the process at a much smaller or much larger winery, but it was still valuable to see how wine goes from grapes to bottle.
I also made a lot of connections. The winemaker I worked for came from Napa, so she knows a lot of people up there and has offered to send my resume to people she knows. As they say, “it’s who you know, not what you know.” So this experience has definitely opened doors and could lead to further opportunities in wine.
And finally, the overtime. Because this is an internship and a temporary position, we were hourly employees, so those days of overtime really added up. There were a couple nice paychecks that I was able to save away for later. However, our harvest was very short so those long hours didn’t last that long. It’s important to remember that a job like this depends on so many factors, and many people working in Napa had their harvests cut short and found themselves without any paycheck.
While there are many upsides to this job and industry, there are also some downsides that I think it’s important to be aware of before trying it out for yourself.
First of all, it is a very physical job, and you’re going to be busy and exhausted. We worked six days a week, with all of those days being at least 10 hours long. A lot of them were closer to 12 hours, and some were more like 14. Particularly on those days, I would get home, maybe scarf some food down, maybe take a shower (or maybe not), then go to bed only to wake up and do it all over again. I am not a coffee drinker but at the end of weeks like that I made sure to have some instant coffee ready to go. Otherwise I had tea every morning. I survived and definitely got stronger throughout the process, but the routine also saved me.
These long weeks also took a toll on my body. My feet were sore every morning when I woke up. Luckily this faded once I got to work up, but it added up over time. My hands also got stained from all the grapes and wine. And tightening all of those valves left my hands cracked and dry. My right index finger is still cracked on the spot where I generally tightened the valves. I had one day off, which didn’t allow much time for exploring the area or entertaining people who maybe would want to visit. Working a harvest means sacrificing a lot of freedom for those 3-4 busy months. Committing to the wine industry means basically always losing the harvest season. All jobs have their sacrifices though, so if you decide you never want to go anywhere during the months of August through November or even December.
Every job has its stresses. In this case, I was helping to make some gooood wine. This comes with a lot of pressure though, especially as a first time wine intern. I spilled wine once while doing a pumpover and thought it was the end of the world. Then I saw a video of a tank that broke in another winery, spilling thousands of gallons of wine and flooding the cellar. I also left the heater on in a bin of Pinot Noir overnight, heating the wine way more than it was supposed to be. That also ended up ok. In the end, we tasted all the wines and none of them were gross! However, there were still some stressful times along the way.
While there were some tough times, I survived my first harvest! It’s a lot of work and takes patience and perseverance. If winemaking is your passion, go for it!