And I'm Back!

The power cord for my laptop arrived today! It's nice to have full access to the outside world once again. I swear New Zealand is stuck in a time warp -- our local radio station plays all the "modern" hits like The Offspring, Eagle Eye Cherry, Nickelback, AC/DC, and tons and tons of U2 (every three songs, by my count). TV is even delayed by about a month... the "all new" episode of Lost was on last night, but it was the same episode I watched the week before I left the States.

Harvest is in relatively full swing and we've officially begun working 12-hour shifts at the winery. I am on the day shift (7AM-7:30PM) with Christina (US-Oregon), Heath (US-California), Erik (US-California), Jen (US-California), Lucien (France), Adeline (France), Paolo (Italy), Milly (UK), and Hiro (New Zealand via Japan). The other half of the cellar hands have been split off into the night crew. We only see them for about 30 minutes a day when each crew changes out at the winery... which makes it really awkward considering we all live in the same house together.

Christina and I had the day off on Monday and we decided to rent a car and drive to Nelson. Driving was an event in itself since they drive on the left side of the road in NZ... and since virtually all cars here are manual transmission (something I am clearly not familiar with) Christina agreed to take the wheel. After 90 minutes of idyllic New Zealand scenery (I think they really DO have more sheep than people here) and Christina's deft driving skills (that's right, "idyllic" and "deft" just happened in the same sentence) we arrived safe and sound in Nelson. More than anything it was just nice to get away from Blenheim... Nelson's still a small town, but it has vastly superior shopping, women, restaurants, and aesthetics in general. I was also fairly stunned to see several high-end apartments and condos going up along the beaches... while construction has pretty much stalled in the US, things appear to be quite on the up in tiny Nelson. My camera battery unfortunately died on the trip there, so I don't have much to document it, but next to our bicycle wine tasting adventures the trip to Nelson has been one of the New Zealand highlights so far.

At the winery things are pretty slow for harvest. I can't tell if it's because I'm used to a smaller winery and a smaller crew, where the same number of tasks are divided among fewer workers -- and thus each worker has a larger workload -- or because things are actually really slow and we have a dozen people to do all the work there is. Or maybe it's door #3... that I actually learned a lot at Elk Cove and I'm just taking everything in stride now. I'll go ahead and say it's a combination of all three... but that doesn't change the fact that we've had it relatively easy thus far.

Each person's work seems to be more specialized than what most of us are used to. Some only work the press lines all day... receiving the fruit from gigantic trucks, pressing it in the presses, pumping it from the juice trays into the tanks, and repeating. Some of us spend our whole days cleaning dirty tanks. Since Christina and I have worked with Nadine before, she has been kind enough to have Christina working closely with the lab in the mornings -- since she is considering Fermentation Science for graduate school -- and has entrusted me with the responsibility/neverending frustration that is the RDV. RDV stands for Rotating Drum Vacuum and it more or less takes the shittiest parts of the juice that we store in our tanks -- this brown, murky, mud-like substance we call the "lees" -- and through what I like to think is witch-craft, filters it in to crystal clear juice that we can turn into wine. Basically it's a shitload of work for not a lot of wine, but it's something akin to wine alchemy so I like to think it's slightly awesome even though it's a tremendous pain in the ass.

Other than that, it's not terribly different than making wine in Oregon or California or anywhere else in the world. We still work long hours and go home wet and stinky... some more than others (with a finger pointed straight at myself). And we have maybe two hours to eat dinner and go to sleep when we get home, or else we don't get anywhere near the recommended 8 hours of nightly sleep. Unless you're like me and you stay up till midnight typing blog entries.

So without further adieu I will crash for the night, since I have to be up at 6AM. Thanks for reading and keep the comments coming!

Much Love,

Brandon