It's been a while since my last post, and rightly so since I've been living the life of a zombie lately... We started working around the clock at Yealands this past week, with two different 12 hour shifts. I'm on nights and it's been a struggle for me to get used to. The first night I literally felt nauseated...by hour nine I wasn't sure if I was going to pass out or throw up. It's odd, but the last two hours of the shift are always the easiest. It's when you get about three-quarters of the way through that you're not sure if you're going to make it. However, since the first few nights I'm feeling much better and have pretty well acclimated my body to the time change.
It's not just the sleeping during the day that's different, but making your body's internal clock change to be hungry at the times when you are supposed to eat (our "lunch" is at midnight or 1am). A typical day for me involves waking up for work at around 5 or 5:30pm; I make breakfast and always have a strong cup of coffee. Yealands has vans that drive us to and from work, so I get picked up at about a quarter past six. It's a 25-30 minute drive over two sets of mountains (insanely curvy roads, one part I've come to call Vomit Pass in my mind due to a girl throwing up the first day of work), so we arrive at around 6:45pm. We have a coffee or tea in the smoko room (what they call the break room here) and meet up with our teams. Usually the people on receival bins and presses jump straight to work; you can't stop the grapes from coming in. So far since vintage started we've processed 5,000 metric tons of grapes which is about 11,000 pounds. By the end of harvest they are expecting 20,000 tons.
In the winery I'm on the red team. We are very international and have Argentina, Canada, France, Chile, and the US represented. The picture below shows members of my team, plus a few others. There is a special section of the cellar meant for fermenting red wines only. Here, I work doing cap management, inoculations, tank dig-outs, pressing, additions, cleaning, more cleaning, you name it! When red wines are fermented it is done on the must (juice, skins, seeds) to extract color and tannins. As carbon dioxide is produced, the gas rises to the top of the tanks and packs the must into a cap. It's important for the health of the fermentation to try and break up this cap, so twice per shift we use compressed gas to "punch down" the cap, which is quite fun! Inoculations are always a treat for me because I love the smell of rehydrating yeast, reminds me of baking bread:) The other day I got to climb inside a red tank that had been drained away to shovel out the skins by hand. All I can say is it was the best workout I've ever had! I'll write more as things progress here, but I'll be working so much I won't know what to do this next month! I'm glad though, because when you're extremely tired it's hard to spend money:)
Yealands Red Wine Team, plus a few others. Red team includes the first 6 people from the left!
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