Week 7: Light on the horizon

The winemakers know it. Everyone can feel it. The end of harvest is coming. There is a combined sense of hope that all of these 12 hour shifts have not been in vain, that we all have contributed in some way to making decent wine, and that someday soon, we will return to only working full time (that is, only 40 hours a week.)

It has been an interesting week. I have still been helping out the yeasties on inoculations and ferment rounds, but it only took one week for the novelty of ferment rounds to lose its appeal. Inoculations are still fun though, you never know what the yeast are going to do, since every tank is different; some yeast go crazy, while some yeast only slightly bubble. However, I am happy to say that none of the tanks that I have helped inoculate need to be re-inoculated. It’s good to know that with all of my new responsibilities that I am doing something right.

This last week, some of us were fortunate enough to have a day off. I say “fortunate,” because the moment that the head winemaker found out that the winery manager was giving us breaks, she put an end to it. And as it turned out, I was one of the lucky ones.

What did I do with my one day off? To quote facebook: “first day off in 3 weeks. The plan: pack a lunch, grab my swim trunks, and bike until the map turns blue :-).” Damn right, I went to the beach.

It turned into quite the adventure. I rented a bike from Duncannon, and hoped the beach would only be less than an hour ride to get there. It turned out that getting to the beach took about two hours, and even then I was not supposed to swim there, due to the steepness of the beach. When I rented the bike, I was given directions to “White’s Bay,” which is the closest beach to Blenheim that you could swim at. The directions I was given at Duncannon mentioned that I would need to bike over a very large hill to get to White’s Bay, and as I was biking, I can remember not seeing a large hill, but remembered a small mountain getting closer as the kilometers passed by. By the time I got to the base of the “large hill,” I was completely exhausted, and was no shape whatsoever to bike over it (especially not on the bikes that Duncannon loaned me, the seat on my bike was quite uncomfortable and I didn’t want to spend any more time on that thing than I absolutely had to.)

Even though I didn’t make it all the way to White’s Bay, it was far from a wasted trip. On the surface, it was a great ride through some very beautiful country (yes, the weather was cooperating yet again.) The valley that Blenheim resides in is unlike anything I have ever seen: It is completely flat (and I mean table-top flat) all the way up to the mountains which surround it, and it seems like the vast majority of it is covered with vineyards (the rest of it is cow and sheep pastures). My bike ride was almost completely uninterrupted after I turned off of Highway 1; it was nice to have the road to myself. There was an unusual amount of police car traffic that day for such an unpopulated area; I never found out what they were all doing out there, though naturally my mind immediately flashed to the movie Fargo.

I even made a discovery. Just north of Rarangi (I’m not sure I spelled that right, but I spelled it how it is pronounced), the town bordering the small mountain I was supposed to bike up, is a place called Monkey Bay. I seriously debated sharing this all with you, there are some places that I feel that the fewer people know about the better, in order to preserve them. Monkey Bay is probably only known to the residants of Rarangi and any local rock climbers, the reasons are obvious if you ever find yourself there. I’m not sure why this place in particular struck a chord with me, maybe it was the combination of the beautiful day with the arduous bike ride and my need to simply get away and be alone for an afternoon. Maybe it was because I found a low cliff shaped like a chair in that I was able to climb up to and eat lunch, while I stared out at the Pacific Ocean. Maybe it was the cave in the back of the bay, which at low tide could be explored. Maybe it was all of the seashells, or the trees, or the fact that on a clear day you could see the north island of New Zealand from the shore. Maybe it was because the Pacific Ocean is turquoise, I don’t know. All I know is that in my seven weeks here, and of all the places that I have been thus far (not too many mind you, but still), I want to go back there the most. I want to go back and see the sun rise on the Pacific. I'm excited at the prospect, I think I may have to work that into my master plan.

There is something very significant about sun rises for me, “spiritual” isn’t the right word, but it’s the only one that comes close (yes, that was a Chuck Palahniuk reference). I truly believe that every day is a new adventure, or can be if you let it. That may sound like a line out of a motivational speaker’s routine, or something out of a preschool sing-along, but hear me out. It doesn’t matter if you have had the same job for ten years, or are backpacking abroad with no real plan to return home, at any point during an otherwise ordinary day, a novel event may take place. In fact, these events happen every day. This event could mean nothing, and you would ignore it like you would a bird in the sky. On the other hand, this event could mean everything: it could challenge you, make you question everything you thought to be true, could alter your perspective on the world around you, and color your perceptions every day henceforth, and so on. When the later happens, the only question left to ask is: What now?

You need to make a choice.

Your actions at that moment, your choice, will become part of you.

Then life as you know it will change.

And so the sun rises on your new adventure.

When I sat down and started writing this blog, I did not expect it to get this heavy. But this has been on my mind quite a bit lately, and there is only one reason as to why: It has been close to four months since I finished my applications, and I have yet to hear a positive response from any of the PhD programs that I have applied to. At the moment, I just want to know for sure if I am going to be in school for the next 5 years, or if I am going to need to fill my time some other way; I’ve been hanging in limbo for what seems like an eternity and I’m sick of it. My head is in all sorts of crazy knots when it comes to graduate school; I hinted a bit at this in my last entry. It’s almost as if life will be simpler if I get into graduate school: sure it will be difficult and all-consuming, but I also get to put off “adulthood” for another 5 years. If I don’t get in, I will have to get a job and become a full time productive member of society. The strange thing is that I am actually looking forward to the later; it’s the former that I’m on the fence about. It’s a big mess.

But for now, all I can do is wait.

Take care everybody!

-DK

Week 6: Adventures in inoculation, and other insights

I am sort of regretting my choice of title of the last entry, as this writing period was definitely much more of a “yeasty blur.” Heavy emphasis on the yeast, but I am getting to that.

This week marks the passing of a personal milestone: before now, the longest I have ever been away from home was 40 days, and that was when I was traveling in Europe with my family in the summer of 2006. It’s fun to think back to think back to then; I kept a journal while I was there as well, and it’ll be fun to compare it to the one I am keeping now. Reading something like a journal or an autobiography can give you a unique snapshot of a person’s personality. It’s more than just looking at the events that the author chooses to tell about, it’s the way the author tells about them, the word choice, the sentence structure, and the author’s thought process. For me, it’ll be really interesting to have that kind of perspective on my past self.

Here’s an interesting thought: you can do the same thing with a blog. I wonder what inferences you all are making about me (amused at the thought, the author pauses to smile and ponder sagely for a moment. Afterwards, the author goes back to listening to Avril Lavigne and resumes writing). Regardless, I am going to continue writing and posting, if only for the reason that I enjoy telling stories to my friends and loved ones.

And speaking of stories, this week (by comparison to the last few) was pretty eventful. After maybe three consecutive days of absurdly light sample loads (tracking the maturity of our grapes is over since we are harvesting everything, so no more playing with the oversized garlic press), Tina decided to let me go and hang out…errr…help out the “yeasties,” while she took care of the lab. Yeastie is the term used at Mud House, at least amongst the cellar hands, to describe the people who are responsible for daily ferment monitoring, making nutrient or supplement additions to tanks per the winemaker’s orders, and of course, inoculating the tanks with yeast.

I need to back up a bit. For those readers who fully understood the last sentence in that paragraph, you can skip ahead, the rest of you get a crash course in yeast’s role in modern winemaking. Everyone knows that grapes get sweeter as they mature, and that sugar can be turned into delicious alcohol by yeast, the same stuff you add to bread to make it rise. Certain strains of wild yeast live on naturally on the skins of the grapes, and you can use this yeast to make wine yeast (the industry term is “native yeast,” recall me talking about Sarasin in the week 3 entry). However, many modern wineries prefer to use their own yeast to run the ferments, allowing them greater control of their finished wine: while there is no yeast in finished wine, the yeast does contribute flavors and odors to the wine during fermentation, and for that reason only certain yeasts are used to make certain wines. However, wild yeast are still present in the grape juice, so to get rid of the unwanted yeast, you simply add lots of your own yeast, and your own yeast will out-compete the native yeast and any other microbes living in the grape juice.

However, yeast need more than just sugar to live; there are several nutrients vital to yeast’s metabolism that must be present in the grape juice in order for the yeast to be happy, make many little yeast babies, and ferment the sugar. The most important yeast nutrient is nitrogen; if yeast doesn’t have nitrogen available for them to use, they will start using sulfur in the place of nitrogen to metabolize sugar and producing hydrogen sulfide gas. This gas smells like rotten eggs, and is not a desirable aroma in finished wine. So in order to prevent this from happening, a nitrogen source may need to be added to the wine. Even after a nitrogen addition, the wine still may smell a bit eggy (the industry term is “sulfury,” but who cares), and if so, a copper sulfate solution is added in small amounts after the fermentation is over to kill the smell. However, if your yeast are happy, all you need to do is monitor (ie: taste) the fermentation and stop it once the alcohol gets high enough or all of the sugar is gone. There is a lot more to it than that, but that is wine yeast science in a nutshell. Back to the story.

My daily routine changed as a result of my new responsibilities. After calibrating the instruments and running the benchmarks, I would grab a tank sampler, basket, and digital thermometer, and head down to the other lab on the far side of the winery to help with ferment rounds. I would then fill my basket with sample jars and go out into the tank farm to sample all the ferments and take their temperature. At this point there are a little less than 100 separate white ferments going (the red cellar crew takes care of sampling the reds), so thankfully there are three of us. Once all of the tanks had been sampled, we then take the brix, so that when the winemakers taste the ferments they know how far the tank has to go until its completely dry. Mundane? Sure. A terrible job to do in the rain? Oh yes. However, at the moment it’s novel, and breaks up my day nicely.

Once the winemakers taste the ferments, they then decide on what additions to make to which tanks. We then go out and make said additions. Usually if an addition needs to be made, the fermentation has either stopped, or is slowing down prematurely, and the addition is usually meant to kick-start the yeast. Depending on the size of the tank, an addition can be as little as 30 grams of some nutrient, to as much as 10kg for the bigger tanks. Some additions cause the wine to foam, and therefore must be added slowly if the tank is very full. This is a lesson that I learned the hard way:

“I was making a 4kg addition of Superfood (yeast nutrients) and a 4kg addition of DAP to a very full tank (tank 4517) of Pinot Gris. I was in a rush to finish, and…well…volcano happened. They warned me about this, and told me that if it happened to just grab a hose and hose off the tank until it stopped erupting. Well, it happened to be one of those times wen there was no water pressure anywhere in the winery, so I turned on the water hose and nothing happened. All I could do was watch in horror as wine poured out of the top of the tank and spilled down the side…It was my biggest goof to-date at the winery (4-12-11).”

Sadly, I was a little too shocked during this ordeal to grab my camera and snap a picture of my wine-foam geyser. The picture above is actually the result of one of the cellar hands making a mistake, but it very much looks like what I saw on that fateful night. I actually checked the tank the next morning to see how much had been lost to stupidity, and the level had barely changed. The tank erupted for a good five minutes, and I didn’t even scratch the surface! It was the first time I realized how much wine was actually in the tanks.

However, of all of my new responsibilities, I think inoculating tanks is probably the most fun. That is, fun for me, everyone else thinks inoculating sucks because it takes a long time and you smell like a bakery afterwards. I am a very strange chemist: I enjoy running the analysis in the lab as much as the next guy, but I jump at any opportunity to leave the lab and do something, anything, in the winery. Inoculating a tank with yeast requires some manual labor, and a talent for finding all of the fittings and tools you need, two skills that don’t have much of a place in a chemistry lab, but I seem to poses both. Yeast are amazing little buggers, when they are healthy they can really metabolize things quickly. The photo shown is of Miriam, one of the full-time yeasties, bailing off the foam from a very excited yeast culture. She added a little bit of juice to the yeast to give them something to eat and start dividing, and they went completely crazy; we had to grab one of our big drums to store the bailed foam.

Suffice it to say that with all of the scurrying around on catwalks and through the forest of wine tanks, I am spending much more time outside then I used to. I wonder if that is why I enjoy working with the yeasties so much: I get to move around more, and I also get to interact with far more people than I do when I am in lab all day. Maybe part of me is not looking forward to the life of tests and chemicals that I have planned and trained for. Or maybe I am just looking forward to traveling around New Zealand after the job has finished. The jury is still out on the first statement, but what I can say for sure is that I hear more about this country with each passing day, and every day I want to try and cram one more thing to do or see in the extra month I have here. I am seriously contemplating changing my ticket, but I’ll cross that bridge a bit later once the whole graduate school issue has been worked out.

Everyone can tell that harvest is drawing to a close. The trucks are still coming fast and furious (there has been a bit of rain, so the fruit is coming in to prevent rot), but there really aren’t that many blocks left to harvest, according to the viticulturalists. Personally, I am just looking forward to going back to 8 hour days. You don’t realize how much you miss those extra 4 hours every day until they are gone, you can do quite a bit with that chunk of time. We will probably have our last 12 hour shift sometime next week. I can’t wait, but I suppose I’ll have to.

That’s all for now. Take care everybody!

-DK

Week 5: A great yeasty blur, punctuated by the joy of exploration, wine tasting and unfathomable awkwardness

I’m looking back at the last week and am wondering why it took me so long to get a blog out, since all I did was work. And then it hit me: all I did, all I have done for the last couple weeks, has been work. 12 hours a day, every day, without fail. It actually hasn’t been all that bad, time flies when you are in the lab. There is always something to do, weather its taking the temperature and brix on a press sample, titrating a free sulfur run, or just cleaning and putting away test tubes. That said, the lab isn’t that big, and sometimes I wish I could be outside in the sun playing with my friends…I mean out crushing grapes and making wine.

That said, a few notable things did happen in the last week (despite the tardiness of this entry, I am still blogging about March 30 through April 5, and am writing as if I wasn’t very late in getting this posted). Let’s get the juicy bit out of the way first. I know I wrote in a previous entry that I wouldn’t gossip about my coworkers in this blog, but I will make an exception for this story, on the grounds that it directly affected my life, and the lives of so many of those around me. After a very strange sequence of events, Ian, the winery manager on night shift (a temporary hire for vintage), was fired. From what I understand (I am on day crew and am simply retelling what was told to me by the night crew), Ian had always had his own way of doing things, and had his own ideas as to how to run the winery. Sadly, his ideas were seldom useful, and it seemed like the first tasks for the day crew were to undo everything Ian did the night before. The joke at the winery was that Greg, the day manager, spent the first hour of his day pissed off because he had to deal with all of the things Ian did hours earlier, and the last hour of his day pissed off because he had to deal with Ian personally. Anyway, Ian had a meeting with the head winemaker one night, the meeting went south in a hurry, and Ian was fired.

Here is where things get strange: A couple nights later, I was in my room at the time on the internet, when I hear a knock at the door. It was Eric.

“Dude, you just missed the weirdest shit ever. Ian showed up at Duncannon and started hanging out.”

I guess he had come by to break the news of his sacking to us. Ian had gone by the time I got out to the common area, but everyone there were still musing and laughing about what had just happened. The idea was floated that his next stop would be the winery to say goodbye to his old crew. We all had a good laugh, and then went to bed. All of us couldn’t wait to tell the night crew what had happened when we got to work the next morning.

However, when we got to work the next morning, the night crew had stories of their own. Ian did indeed show up at the winery; but his intentions were far from friendly. He apparently had tried to start a fight with one of the permanent cellar hands, and then with Sylven, the winemaker on night shift. There weren’t any fights, but the police were called, and Ian was arrested for drunk driving as he left the winery in his car. The winery now has a security guard that stays at the front gate during night shift. And so ends the Ian saga, hopefully. He lives in town though, so I have a strange feeling we will see or hear of him again.

When you work so much, you have to learn to capitalize on the time you get off, even when that time is only hours, rather than days. So in more pleasant, but slightly less interesting news, I have gone on two long runs since I have been in New Zealand. Once I saw how beautiful the country was and how good the weather was going to be, one of the things I realized that I missed most from home were my running shoes, and running in them. It took me three weeks to find a running shop with shoes my size (I was working, so I only had days off to go looking), and I wasted no time breaking them in. My first run started off as a light jog to explore the southern part of Blenheim, but instead turned into a two hour round trip excursion, during which I found myself on top of Mt. Vernon, of one of the mountains which surround the Marlborough valley. To get to the top, I had to hike through a “farm park,” which is exactly what it sounds like: a nature park open to the public, but included fences, sheep, and cattle. It was a great little adventure, though I wish I had started it an hour later: when I got to the top of Mt. Vernon it was cloudy and by the time I got back to the bottom it was pouring rain, had I started later the view would have been spectacular. I will be back though, hopefully on a good day, and armed with my camera as well.

(Side note: this run actually happened during the previous writing period, but it fits more with this entry)

My second run came on a tip from Jules Taylor, one of the client winemakers. Jules has made a name for herself and her wines here in New Zealand; I’m not sure if she exports to the states, but if she does you should seek her wines out, because they are quite good. Some of her 2010 products even won some awards out here. Anyway, on her tip, I decided to run into town, but then make a turn down hill and run along the river (this is the same river that runs behind Duncannon. To my surprise, not only was there a paved path along both sides of the river, but the whole riverbank area was a public park: there were grass fields along both banks, some park benches, and even a play structure. I decided to turn around and go home at a spot where someone had built a small BMX bike rhythm section and a couple jumps. Jules said that the path runs all the way to the dam outside of town, but that was longer than I wanted to run.

As for the work itself, it still holds my interest. I have even found a way to enjoy my time in the winery a bit more, or at least make it pass faster. When I worked for Gallo, one of the things that people naturally assumed about my job was that since I worked for a wine company, I got to drink wine every day; sadly, I had to explain to people that I worked in grape assessment, and didn’t deal with wine at all. Now, I can honestly say that I do get to taste wine on nearly a daily basis. Part of the winemaker's job is to taste and make notes on all of the ferments. Normally, the wine for this tasting is pulled by another person, and the tasting is done in another lab on the premises. However, once the sugar level in a given tank gets below a certain level, my lab starts pulling the sample and reading it on the FTIR, since it is more accurate when dealing with small concentrations (it's a little more complex then that, but that statement is true enough for this text). That said, the winemakers still need to taste those ferments, so when I pull a sample, I always pull it so they have enough. Afterwards, there is always a little left over, and I figured if I was going to simply throw it out, I might as well taste it before I do. The best part is that Tina is OK with this: she is all for letting me learn about the sensory assessment of wine. Tasting the samples is probably the highlight of my day; I taste around five ferments a day, and every day each tank tastes a bit different. I am seriously considering bringing my journal in so I can take notes on what I taste, but I don’t want to push my luck. Besides, I only get to taste when there is nothing else to do in the lab, and those days are getting fewer and far between. Still, I am slowly becoming an educated wine drinker, something which I am quite thrilled about.

Asside from the interesting bit’s I wrote about in this entry, there isn’t a lot that goes on in the lab that I can explain to the layperson in detail. I can say this for sure: there haven’t been any mistakes so far, and none of our instruments have broken, so I would say that we are doing pretty damn good, all things considered. As of now we are about halfway done with our harvest, and since things are going much faster now that all of the grapes are ripe, the second half of crush should fly by. I hope so…as much as I enjoy these four-figure paychecks, I am really looking forward to going back to 8 hour days, and eventually the end of my assignment.

That’s all for now. I’m sorry there aren’t any pictures in this entry; I’ve already shown you the inside of my lab, and this last week that’s all I’ve really seen! Hopefully Tina will email me some pictures of some sunsets over the winery soon, and when she does I will post them with this entry.

Take care everybody!

-DK

Edit 4-16-11: I am reminded today why I don't like posting when I am tired. I re-read this entry and noticed a couple glaring spelling errors, as well as some flow issues. I corrected those, as well as re-arranged a couple paragraphs so it reads better. No pictures yet, sorry :-(.

Week 4: Letters home

I’m winging this one; I haven’t written a single thing in my journal all week. There are two reasons for this, both are related: first, that I have been working 10-12 hour days every day this writing period, and as a result, nothing terribly interesting has happened. It seems like I am always busy, despite the fact that the grapes are only trickling in at this point. I guess I should gage “busy” by how many samples I run throughout the day, not how long I spend cleaning everything.

Earlier this week, I wrote an email to my sister in Boston. For those that don’t know, my little sister and I have always been close; contrary to the norm amongst my other friends with little siblings, we were always friends growing up, despite our differences. And I think now that we both are more mature and have our own perspectives and experiences to share, we have gotten a closer. I always look forward to hearing from her, and continue to marvel at how she manages to balance excelling at school, a social life, and a budding career as an actress. Speaking of which, she actually got to star in a very professional looking student film; in the words of the director, a "science fiction epic," which hopefully will be available online. I can't wait to see it, and I will of course post it here so you can see it as well, if it's available online.

Anyway, I re-read the email that I sent her, and I realized that it was a pretty good, albeit terse, recap of the last week. So instead of a full length blog, I decided to share the email with you.

Dear Angie,

Tonight I felt like writing you an email instead of blogging. I'm having a hard time deciding on what to write about in this one, since I haven't done anything terribly memorable, besides break some glassware and startle my boss.

Other than the glassware incident, work has been going pretty well. I wish people were more organized over here, there is no way to tell how busy we are going to be, or how many samples we are going to get on a day to day basis, though I feel it wouldn't be too hard to do, since Gallo does it quite well.

The best part of my job is working with my boss, Tina. I definitely trump her in raw chemistry knowledge, but she has been in the wine industry for 5 years and definitely knows what she is doing. She's a fun lady to work for; the last couple of days haven't been so busy, so we've just hung out a lot (she's also married, so wipe that grin off your face).

One of the other cool aspects of my job is that I see winemakers on a daily basis, something which never happened at Gallo. The winemakers were always these semi-omnipotent figures in another building that our instruments were trying to catch up to at Gallo, so It’s still a bit weird for me when they come into the lab and ask me about samples that were dropped off earlier in the day. It's nice to feel important like that; at Gallo the results of my analysis filled in one column of a very large chart, here the chart is much smaller and my results fill the entire chart (ie: I do everything). Tomorrow I am actually going to get to taste the ferments with the winemakers, which I am very much looking forward to.

Other than that, it’s not a terribly interesting job. Most of the common tests we do are now muscle memory at this point. The scienceyist parts of my day happen when I get a number that doesn't quite make sense, but sadly that usually means that I did something wrong or the tank was sampled incorrectly.

Right now it is pouring down rain. I have no idea what this is going to do to the fruit or do to my work load. At this point, the sugar levels in the grapes are high enough that if they get wet and a little bit warm they will rot on the vine, which would kill the vintage. I will find out tomorrow what will happen to us now.

Well, that’s the update from my end. Oh, and I have a birthday present for you, but I'm not sure I can get it to you in time, since the post office is closed when i get off work every day.

I greatly look forward to your return email, though i know you are a busy girl....err....lady. Talk to you soon!

Love Always,
Dan

PS: In regards to your request for me to club an Aussie male and bring him home with me for you marry, will you settle for a Spaniard with an uncanny resemblance to Hugh Jackman? He is eight years your senior, but it’s your call.