Days to Savor

As expected, Friday was fabulous. Please accept my apologies for bragging a bit, but I know this is the day/weekend I will have to reflect upon when I’m in the midst of my 7^th 12 hour overnight shift in a row… which will be the case in about 3 weeks time.

We started Friday morning with about 2 hours of cleaning, which was not without a few moments of excitement… like when I hoisted a hose over my shoulder and looked down to spot this plum-sized wolf spider (yes, VERY venomous) perched on one of the loops. Needless to say I dropped that hose and ran/jumped/screamed my way across the winery.

enemy #1

After that, I had to go back behind the fermenters to power wash them and the nastiness on the floors behind them. Thoroughly freaked out, my getup was meant to keep all creepy crawlies out.

anti-invasion of creepy crawlies

From the cleaning, we proceeded to the most incredible tasting experience I’ve ever had. We tasted at least 9 of Two Hands wines from the barrel, with Michael (the owner) and Matt (the winemaker) explaining why each wine tasted so exceptionally different from the next, whether it be the soil, the slope of a particular vineyard (factors known at the terroir), the additions they made pre- barrel aging, the barrels the wine was fermented in, etc… why hello, sensory and information overload.

Barrel tastes: Trent, Lindsey, Chelsea, Reed (a.k.a. Michael J. Fox), Tim, Michael (a.k.a. owner, expert spitter)

We then tasted 18 wines from the bottle, again with the explanation of why each wine varied.

Amazingness.

This tasting differed from all others I’ve done, and likely all others I will do outside of this circumstance, because we weren’t being spoken with by a sales rep, trying to peddle a wine he/she could likely care less about beyond next week’s paycheck. We were being educated and enlightened by two men whose livelihood depends on our appreciation and respect for their wines over the next several weeks. Pretty cool.

After that we headed to lunch at Vintners Bar & Grill, one of the best restaurants in the Barossa. Michael brought along these wines for us to enjoy with lunch. Including one of Chelsea’s family’s wines… A ’97 cab from Chateau Montalena… one of the best Napa vintages. Yummm.

More amazingness from Michael's personal cellar.

Since we had the afternoon off, we headed to Whistler’s cellar door, to taste through their wines with Sam, whose family owns Whistler, pouring for us. Sam’s mom has a soft spot for kangaroos, and has a little park set up next to the vineyard to provide a home for those who have been orphaned when their moms were hit by cars. This is their joey (baby roo), Buttons. I am in love.

Feeding Buttons almonds.

On Saturday, we headed to Adelaide to enjoy the Fringe Festival. A nearly month-long carnival, music and comedy fest that kicked off this weekend. We walked around the park where the fest is, rode some rides, had a delicious Indian dinner on Rundle Street, headed back to the fest for some more entertainment and then on to a bar for some dancing. Our fun night out was followed by a proper slumber party on Kate's (our housemate Nathan's gf) living room floor. What could be better for some team bonding?



dinner at Taj Tandoor



l-r: Erica, Reed, Pedro, Florent, Nathan, Lindsey, Tim, Chelsea, Random

hahaha

pillow fight, circa 7th grade

Grunt Work

Over half way through my first week, one of the main points Matt stated during our formal induction has proved true: “We in the winemaking business are really just professional cleaners.” The things I have cleaned this week should be cleaned by a professional. Fermenters on Tuesday, with caustic acid and citric acid. Smut laden cellar floors yesterday and spider and bird infested warehouses along with muddy drainage canals at the Branson facility today. Ugh. It has certainly not been glamorous, but obviously, it is extremely important to maintain cleanliness in a wine-making facility. That and I am really looking forward to my first Australian paycheck, and since that seems to require picking up dead birds and dodging spiders, I’m their girl.

mucking drainage canals - with a sincere smile

In addition to a little cleaning yesterday, we had an extensive confined space training (required as we have to climb into fermenters from time to time, which are considered “confined spaces”). It was about 4 hours of classroom time, 2 hours of role-playing (I had to pretend to be high on chemicals and then pass out at one point), followed by an hour-long written exam. About 95% of it applied to miners so it was basically a massive waste of time. Safety stuff that’s not a waste of time: the fashionable steel toed boots, neon reflective vest and safety glasses I purchased earlier this week (pictured above). It's a long way from suits and my Cole Haan Nike Airs!



scary venemous red back



A note about the Branson facility… as you can see from the pic below, the Branson fermenters, while covered by a roof, are essentially completely outdoors. This is why the birds are such an issue and they have someone come out to exterminate them with relative regularity. The nasty part is that the person who exterminates them is not responsible for picking them up (nor was anyone else, until we arrived). Once the fermentation begins, we’ve been told that the birds no longer come around because of the carbon dioxide. Unfortunatley, I do not think that applies to the massive venemous spiders. 

Branson's outdoor fermenters

Between cleaning bird bits and scrubbing various parts of machinery at Branson, we had a wonderful lunch at the Marananga facility. They recently had a brick pizza oven installed here for Cellar Door guests, but staffers get to enjoy the oven on Thursdays. As there were several distributors in town, Michael was on-site and had us participate in a little Louis Jadot tasting guessing game. Best 3 hour lunch I’ve had in a while : )

the view from the Marananga facility

Tomorrow will be fabulous. We’ll have to do about two hours of cleaning in the morning, but then Michael (the owner) and Matt (the head winemaker) are rescuing us to do some bottle and barrel tasting. In addition to tasting Two Hands, it sounds like Michael will be bringing in various bottles from vineyards all around Australia. After that, we’ll be heading somewhere for a nice lunch with them and then we’ll have an early dismissal.

The plan for the weekend is to head into Adelaide where a huge music festival will be kicking off on Friday afternoon. Then on to Norwood on Sunday where the Barossa Valley Wine and Food Festival will be in full swing.

Best of luck to those who are heading off to Logistics this weekend! And much love and comfort to my family and extended family, celebrating the beautiful life of kindest man who I've had the honor of knowing.

An Introduction

Today was the first day of work for the Two Hands 2011 Harvest Crew. We gathered for an introductory meeting at 8ish (ish refers to whenever Matt Wenk, our winemaker arrives). In addition to Erica, Chelsea and myself, the crew is made up of:

Nathan: a native of the Barossa, also our housemate

Fabbiano: an Aussie born Italian

Tim: a Kiwi who has left his wife and 5 month old baby at home in New Zealand to come here and make good money to support his “small family”

Pedro: is from Mexico and recently received his masters from the Enology program in Adelaide

Reed: from Santa Barbara. Nicest wine dork I have ever met. Also tells terrible jokes, a la Freid and Rigel.

Darren: Another housemate from Cali. Very talented musician.
Lindsey: Californian #5. This smarty-pants graduated from undergrad with a chem degree and thus will be doing lab work during this harvest.

Florent: One of the prettiest exports from France I’ve ever seen. His family owns a small vineyard in the Rhone Valley, but he’s come to Oz to learn English between his junior and senior year at university.

It’s a pretty diverse team which is going to be awesome.

During our meeting, Matt laid out how the next 10 days or so will go for us… formal induction will take place tomorrow (apparently we get a handbook that is 2 inches thick). Wednesday is safety training day. Friday we’ll be barrel tasting EVERYTHING in the cellar, followed by, as Michael, the owner of Two Hands promised: naps under trees.

We took a short tour around the Marananga facility where the smaller production, finer wines are produced and then took off for Rocland, a facility where much of the Angel’s Share and higher production wines are produced and aged.

Rocland is a huge warehouse-like structure, housing hundreds of barrels. We spent the day racking barrels, which is the process by which lees (deposits of dead yeast) are separated from the clear wine in a barrel, as you pump out the clear wine into another receptacle. In this case, we used a “small” volume pump to pump Angel’s Share from about 60 oak barrels to a 5 ton stainless steel tank. A high volume pump was used to simultaneously pump wine from that tank into smaller tanks that were sitting on a flat bed. Once full, those tanks were driven over to a 3 story tall tank where the 2009 Angel’s Share will sit for a while longer. Whew. Once the barrels were emptied, they needed to be turned over to dump the remaining wine and lees, which we collected to be reused at a later date. The barrels were then cleaned with a high pressure washer, treated with a sulfur solution to keep the barrels from becoming too porous, then an acid mixture treatment was introduced and then the barrels were filled with water to be stored.

Racking barrels is a very, very tiny part of the process that it takes to bring a bottle of wine to our market shelves, but it is enormously time consuming. Although racking is simple, repetitive and only mildly physically strenuous, today has left me exhausted and with a new appreciation for every drop of wine I will ever taste.

Erica and I did muster enough energy to take a walk down the street for a cozy Valentines Day dinner at the local "bogan" (whiskey tango) hangout. We weren't expecting much, but the people watching was excellent and the chicken schnitzel and garlic bread were actually quite yummy. Happy Valentine's Day!

in●transit(ion)

How does one start a modern day memoir (let’s face it, that’s exactly what a blog is). I’ll strive to make mine more interesting than 99% of all memoirs, and I promise that the first entry will be the longest. At some point, I’ll probably disappoint you with an unwelcome plethora of information or detail, or conversely, with not enough. I welcome you to exert your free will and promise not to be disappointed by your decision. As I know some of you are only going to click the link to see what wine thoughts I have to share from the Southern Hemisphere, I’ll post those at the bottom of each entry and I’ll try to keep a running list for you, as well.  

And so, we commence.

I am in transit from hemisphere to hemisphere. Country to country. Megalopolis to city to small town. From winter to summer. And back, perhaps? I am in transition from corporate cog to cellar hand. I am in transition from content, stressed, depleted, to excited, whole and joyful. From winter to summer (yes, figuratively, too). And that is just the beginning of what I am hoping for from this transit(ion)… But for now, I’m pleased to begin with a ripening, or shall we call it a veraison?   

I arrived in Australia on Wednesday. The only aspect of my journey to get “here” from “there” that felt brief/short/effortless/easy was the 13 hour plane ride from LAX to Brisbane. It’s not nearly as miserable as everyone thinks it is. 

With my first career as a meeting planner, which regularly had me put up in plush resorts, behind me in the states, I headed from the airport to a 6-bunk YHA Youth Hostel room in Adelaide. With the exchange rate at AUD .97 to USD 1.01 ish, and an Australian minimum wage of $15/hour (meaning everything here is exorbitantly expensive), there was no way I would be checking into a Hyatt. (Oh, and in case any of you plan to hostel it up anytime soon, just a friendly reminder that they don’t supply towels and you generally have to make your own bed. Riiiigght. Check.)

At the YHA, Erica, Chelsea and I met up and got to know one another through trips to the beach, exploring the nearby botanical garden and by checking out a few hotels (which is what they call pubs – not confusing at all). Erica is from LA and has worked in the largest single location wine shop there for the past couple of years. The girl knows her vino. Chelsea hails from Napa royalty (clue: Bottle Shock). This one has been living and breathing wine likely since she was in the womb and is a recent graduate of the UC Davis Enology program. I’ll be working harvest at Two Hands alongside these two gals, several other Americans who rotate between Northern and Southern Hemisphere harvests and some assistant winemakers in training. Needless to say, my 7+ years of devotion to fermented grape juice and all its trappings, leaves me vastly less-experienced and far less qualified for this position than my 24 and 22yo counterparts and our other company. Should be an interesting few months! Fortunately, it shouldn't take too much skill to clean and haul hoses to start, and forklift training is mandatory for everyone. Yippeee!

Regardless of any nerves I have about starting vintage tomorrow, I am still enjoying my “pinch me” moments. No, I still cannot believe I’m here. Several times throughout the day I stop and question whether or not this is actually happening. And when I decide that it is actually happening, a nervous quiver of excitement runs through me and I find myself grinning. If you’ve never done something that terrifies you and exhilarates you all at the same time, I strongly encourage you to get to it.  

Anyway, “here” is now a small town in the Barossa Valley (henceforth to be referred to as “the Barossa”): Nuriootpa. Nuri for short. Population 5030.  Lonely Planet calls it the commercial center of the Barossa. There is a hardware store, a grocery store, a pet shop, bakery and second hand store. What more could one need?

We’ve made good use of our time here thus far, making Two Hands our first stop in the Valley on Friday, and tasting through all of their open bottles. After a little grocery shopping at the local farmers market and second hand store furniture shopping for our sparsely furnished rooms, our triumvirate footed it to Penfolds cellar door (as tasting rooms are called here) Saturday. Today we took it upon ourselves to venture out on foot to Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop (she’s like the Australian Martha Stewart). Google Maps is proving to be a bit unreliable here as we wound up trespassing through several acres of vineyards and a few horse farms to get there. Between the swarms of locusts, (literally) zillions of ants, vine line posts that ended in barbed wire lined dead ends and slippery mud, it felt like we were trapped in a video game. Fortunately, just like in video games, there was a handsome reward awaiting us at the end: a lunch of mixed greens, freshly-baked bread and mushroom pate, complete with a chilly glass of Voignier… all to be enjoyed on a sun-bathed deck aside a turtle-filled pond. Nice finish to my first weekend in Oz.

Tomorrow will begin the real wine-making adventure, but just a few notes on tastes thus-far:

Two Hands (8 wines tasted)

We’ll be barrel tasting on Thursday, so I’m going to withhold the majority of my thoughts on Two Hands until then, but for now:

From the Single Vineyard Series, I loved the Zippy’s Block Shiraz. This was a lovely medium- to full-bodied wine which was complex enough to intrigue me and then left my palate with a comforting sense of cocoa.

Sally, our Cellar Door hostess mentioned that the 2009 Bella’s Garden Shiraz was a better vintage than the 2008 which was recently recognized at #2 on Wine Spectator’s Top 100 of 2010. I have nothing to compare the 2009 to as I didn’t have a chance to taste 2008’s Bella’s Garden, but it was a scrumptious wine. If you see it out there, I highly recommend buying more than one bottle.

Penfolds (12 wines tasted)

Beautiful Cellar Door here, but definitely far removed from where the actual action happens. HUGE producer.

I’ll preface this recommendation, and all other chard recommendations I make, with the caveat that I prefer a BIG oaky, buttery chard. Penfolds 2010 Thomas Hyland Chardonnay was quite nice along these lines.

Their 2008 Cellar Reserve Tempranillo was interesting… chewy with lots of tobacco on the nose and some nice blackberry notes, too.

I’ve never been a huge fan of tawnies, but I will be purchasing a bottle of the Bluestone Grand Tawny. Sipping this took me to sitting in a sugar house in Vermont with hot maple syrup being passed around for a taste. There was also some butterscotch in there somewhere and then it rounded out with a nice candied walnut finish. Delish.

I hope those of you who do not make a habit of actually tasting the wine you're drinking got a nice laugh out of the last couple of paragraphs : )