Punch Down: Final Day of Work

Today is the final day of work for the interns. Many started to leave last after last week due to the shorter hours and lack of work, and now everyone will be heading out for good.

At this time in the cellar, most of the work is racking and transfers, with a little bit of "cap management" type work (punch downs) going on with the reds. Oh yeah, still plenty of cleaning going on. As mentioned before, it has been a very short harvest down here. All of the fruit seemed to get ripe at the same time and yielded lower than expected (8000 tonnes instead of 10000 tonnes), which translates into less work.

Locations like New Zealand, that rely heavily on outside international laborers coming to help with vintage, have a unique set of circumstances when it comes to hiring their cellar staff. New Zealand is dependant on receiving outside labor to handle the workload associated with all aspects of the winery and vineyards, including pruning and cellar work. With a national population around the 4.3million mark, they don't have the resources that locations like California has to pull from. So, many of the vintage travel from great distances and have certain expectations when it comes to the work. That is, x amount of hours @ y amount of money, and of course, the experience is priceless. The winery also has a certain expectation of labor demands for the vintage, which is going to be based off of previous years results, and also expectations for the current vintage. So, there are assumptions and a bit of guesswork going on.

This year was a good example of how expectations can fall short with these situations: Yealands had less fruit than planned, probably hired a few too many people, and the fruit came in later than usual (about 1-2 weeks later), but then came in very very fast. It really came to a point where they didn't need the vintage staff with such little cellarwork to do, but because many traveled so far with certain expectations, they did the nice thing and worked the schedule to keep people on the minimum amount of time expected (6 weeks).

I have heard stories like this before, but much worse, from other vintage workers who talked about travelling to a destination and having to pack up and leave way early because the crop got severely damaged. My situation wasn't nearly that bad, just a bit disappointing. It did remind me of a few important things in life: Never assume, a plan is just a plan and can change at any time, and of course, mother nature can be unpredictable.

In a nutshell.... Bad news: less work. Good news: more travel time.

below are pics from the vintage party at the cork and keg.