A few months ago Stephen Colbert partnered with the United Farm Workers to promote the Take Our Jobs program. It was a hilarious clip about Colbert working the fields and “taking the job” of a farm worker. It reminded me of an experience that D’Aun and I had back in 2002-03.
D’Aun and our friends Gene & Diane talked me into a “weekend getaway to create our own wine.” I was skeptical. Okay, I was more than skeptical … I was grumpy. You want me to pay somebody to pick their grapes and create a few cases of wine? And you call this fun? Naturally, I lost this argument, so off we went to a Bed & Breakfast just north of Healdsburg.
The Bed & Breakfast owners realized that people would pay to make their own wine. They began packaging weekend wine packages that allowed their guests to harvest the grapes, crush the grapes, age the juice, mix the wine, do the bottling, etc etc. Guests would come in the fall for the harvest, then again in the spring for the bottling. When all was done, the guests would leave with a case of red wine and a case of white wine. It was a way for the B&B to sell some rooms, set themselves apart from their competition, and offer something truly unique. D’Aun, Diane and Gene just thought it was a wonderful idea.
To me, it sounded like work. Real work, as in laboring under the hot sun with a pair of clippers in my hand as I leaned over a vine and clipped a cluster of grapes … and doing so over, and over, and over. Then hauling all those grapes to the truck, driving them to the winery, hauling them again into the work area, lifting them into the crusher, funneling all the wine into storage containers, etc etc. It sounded like I was going to be a migrant suburban farm worker for a day.
Look, I love wine. But I love to drink wine, not create it.
Thankfully, it wasn’t hard labor at all. It didn’t take long to harvest enough grapes for our purposes. And a few people were so eager to dive into the crushing process that I mostly sat back and watched. By mid-afternoon our work was done and we were sitting by the pool.
Perhaps the hardest part of the process was listening to our leader explain the process of making wine. It felt like high school biology class all over, and my eyes soon glazed over. There were certainly some highlights — having Gene around means some very funny things are going to be said that keep us laughing. But by the time I was sitting at the pool my science-impaired brain was confused. No matter … the wine was going to be terrible anyway, so why try to learn from a flawed process?
Flawed, you ask? Yes, a flawed process. I mean c’mon … we were harvesting to fit the timeline of the B&B, not to fit the time for the grapes to be at their best. We had no idea which grapes were best to harvest so we just picked them all. And the biggest flaw of them all? After crushing we put the juice into Rubbermaid garbage cans for aging! Now what would you expect from that process … Opus One? No, we got what we deserved: something akin to drinkable battery acid.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The return trip in the Spring was when we blended and bottled the wine. The wine barrels … um, garbage cans … had stored the juice as it became wine, and the big debate was how to blend the wines into something drinkable. It was obvious to me that we needed to blend it with the garbage disposal and head to the nearest BevMo if we wanted something drinkable, but others in the group took the process a lot more seriously. The bottling process was a fun (if messy) process and corking was at times hilarious as people pushed them all the way into the bottle (I figured having an extra cork in the bottle would just add to the flavor). Each couple created their own labels and we had a competition for the best design (we won … I put a picture of them below).
The whole thing reminded me of the great French proverb, “The best use of bad wine is to drive away poor relations.” Thankfully, we’ve never had to do that.
In the end, it was a memorable experience. D’Aun, Gene and Diane were right — it was a lot of fun. Not particularly educational, but fun. And we walked away with two cases of absolutely wonderful carburetor cleaning fluid …. um, I mean wine. Come on over sometime and we’ll poison you with it.
Emi 'Ula 'Ula Waina means "Cheap Red Wine" in Hawaiian. Or at least I think it does. The artwork is by renwoned artist Arman Manookian and is a piece that we once owned (and now resides at the Honolulu Academy of Art).
The back of the label reads, "Selected grapes from some of the best growing regions in California were hand picked by suburban day laborers to bring you this unbelievable red wine. Only the finest Rubbermaid garbage cans were used during the aging process, creating a taste that could only be described as plastique. If the aging was done in a modern style, the bottling method was most definitely traditional in its use of messy spills and excessive sampling. We hope you drink our wine at special occasions, wakes, and when the in-laws visit. Bon appetit!