When you say “wow”, remember the toil

Enjoying a bottle of wine is as easy as falling off a log. The most anyone has to do is debate a bit about whether it should be this bottle or that one, carry the bottle home from the store, set up a few glasses, find the corkscrew, pull the cork, and sip. But the experience of the winemaker and his or her staff could not be more different…

First, there’s the year in and year out worrying - What will the whims of the market bring this year? What kind of weather will we experience? Will my labor force be stable? Are my relationships with my distributors solid? What if the economy goes south? - “luxury” goods like wine are the first thing to go…These sorts of anxious concerns never really leave the heads of winemakers, despite the fact that these preoccupations are beyond the control of most vignerons.

Then there are the concrete financial concerns. Many wineries, especially in the New World, are in serious hock. And as all of us who have mortgages know, when the bank wants its money, it wants its money. The problem for winemakers is that they’re never sure that they’ll actually HAVE the money, and if they don’t, whether they’ll have sell the tractor for a mule, or learn to eat less to make up the shortfall. Many winemakers walk this knife-edge year after year with little real hope of getting ahead of the curve. There’s an old saying in the wine business that some of you may have heard that goes:

Q: “How do you make a small fortune in the wine business?”
A: “You start out with a large one?”

Clearly this is an example of a cynical joke, but there’s more than a few grains of truth to this old saw…

And then we reach the actual, backbreaking labor that is winemaking. Many winemakers (especially the really wealthy ones) never touch a grafting knife or drive a tractor in 100 degree heat, but LOTS of them do, and most of them because they have no other choice. And I can tell you from direct experience how hard at least the harvesting end of the pursuit can be. When I was living in Florence in the late 80’s just post-college, I was living basically hand to mouth off of savings and by teaching some English as a supplement. So when a friend of mine asked if I was interested in making a few Lire picking grapes in Chianti, I jumped at the chance. The money was better than anything else I could get legally (not that this was techically “legal” either), and I was already fairly deeply immersed in all things oenological, so it was a no-brainer.

My friend picked me up at 4:30 AM so we could be at the winery with pruning scissors in hand, and ready to pick by 6 AM. It was late September, and up in the hills of Chianti at that hour, it was dark, damp, and cold. In Chianti, most of the vines are set up in various mid-height training systems. The tops of the vines are usually about at eye level, but the bunches themselves hang between chest and knee-level, so this clearly means bending over ALL DAY (12 hour day by the way). We were instructed to take all but the most damaged or underripe bunches (which requires digging through layers of foliage) and fill the coal bucket-sized plastic pails provided. Once full, we were to pass the pails under the row we were working on to the nearest row that had a tractor with a wheeled bin hooked up behind. The pails were emptied into these bins, passed back, and the picking continued. Needless to say, this is literally back-breaking work, and there’s no better way to do it. Some tried working from their knees, but soon found out that this was just as fatiguing, and even slower going, which elicited some serious castigation and whip-cracking from the old-timers…

And let me add a little wrinkle to all this sweet misery (there’s alwyas a “wrinkle” or two, isn’t there?). The vintage year was 1989, and those of you who know their Chianti vintages know that this was a cool, wet year which brought plenty of rot. Rot equals split berries, and split berries bring BEES and WASPS. Guess what happens when you separate these critters from their lunches…yes, I think I heard somebody mumble the answer - you get STUNG - REPEATEDLY…It took 5 days to complete the harvest…

The list of obstacles, hardships, hidden costs, and general frustrations involved in winemaking could go on for pages, but the little vignettes outlined above give a fair “core sample” of how decidedly UNROMANTIC winemaking really is for the most part, unless of course you’re a millionaire industrialist that can hire others to sweat and worry while you attend gold-plated wine galas and pose for slick magazine ads in vineyards that you may have only ever set foot in for the photo shoot, sSo the next time you raise a glass of nectar to your lips, remember those who truly sweat, strain, and bleed to make it.

TOM CIOCCO