Harvest Time!

No time to sit back and unwind. Nope. Things shift into a whole new gear when it's time to make the doughnuts, er pick the grapes. So much so, in fact, that come harvest time, Charlie hires a dozen pickers (from all over the world it seems) to get the job done. This hiring results in a more than doubling of the size of the Rippon Vineyards staff, and makes the ritual morning greetings exponentially more enjoyable! To Brent (the only other American) I say: "howdy." To Antoine and Camille (our Frenchies) I say: "bonjour mon amis." To Christina (Colombian) and Augustin (Peruvian) I say: "buenas dias mis amigos." To Simon (German) I say "guten morgen." To Lou, Alana, Chris, and Kathy (all Kiwis) I say "g'day." For my Aussie friend Tim, I throw in a "mate." To Emily (Canadian) I always present my greeting in the form of a question: "It's a good morning, eh?" And to my Scottish friend, Lewis, I quite deliberately say: "Top 'o the marnin' to ye," to which he replies: "I'm not bloody Irish, you wanker!" Ahh, the day can't really begin in earnest until you've raised the hackles of a Scotsman! I've mentioned that this motley collection are Pickers. Their job is to--well I hope you've put this one together--pick the grapes. They snip the bunches from the vines and place them in plastic bins. When the Pickers fill their bins, they leave them under the rows to be collected by the Porters.

Ned and Amy are our trusty Porters. They motor along through the rows on their four-wheeler and trailer, collecting all the full bins left by the pickers. They then deposit them at the head of the rows to be collected and transported to the winery by the Monitor. I am the Monitor! No, I am not a civil war-era iron-clad battleship, thank you very much. I am the record keeper of the harvest. It is the Monitor's job to keep track of such things as the total number of bins per load, number of bins picked per row, type and clone of grape, block and parcel of land, and number and time of load. For example: Load number 12 was delivered to the winery at 8:45am and consisted of 54 bins of Pinot noir (clone 777) grapes picked from block A, parcel 6, which is six rows long, giving us an average of 9 bins per row. The powers that be assumed (correctly as it were) that such a job would appeal to my meticulous nature. I have my own little clipboard and everything! Oh, but hold your horses dear readers. Lest you begin to think my role purely bureaucratic in nature, let me nip it in the bud and correct your faulty line of reasoning forthwith. Actually, mine is not only the most meticulous job of the harvest, it is also--and by a long way I might add--the most physically demanding. I have to lift each and every 10-15kg bin onto my truck from down in the vineyard and then again from my truck onto the sorting table up at the winery. With an average of 40-50 bins per load and about 12-15 loads per day, the "Kay Gees" (or "Ell Bees" for you lot still on the Imperial system of measurement) add up! Nick did the math and figured out that I lifted 3.5 metric tons of weight onto the sorting table one day. That means I lifted 7 metric tons total that day, because I lift every bin twice--once onto my truck and a second time onto the sorting table.

Back on my first day at the vineyard two months ago, I thought the job putting out the nets was tough. That was nothing compared to this job. There's no way I could've done this job in the shape I was in a couple months back. No frickin way! But, luckily enough for me, I'm not in the shape I was in a couple months back. I'm actually quite fit now, thank you very much. I've never been, and probably will never be, what I'd consider "buff." However, I've turned into one lean, mean, grape-lifting machine! My 34-inch waist jeans now fall straight to the floor unless I've got my belt cinched up to it's tightest setting. And my shoulders, chest, and arms are noticeably bigger than they've ever been in my life. I gotta tell ya, I kinda like the new me!

Well, harvest has been going on for three weeks now, but unfortunately my computer chose this same time to crash and burn on me; and I haven't had much energy at the end of each day to trudge down to the internet cafe to update the blog while it's been at the repair shop. Thus, there is a substantial backlog of blog fodder concerning harvest. I got my laptop back from the computer repair guy today, hence this entry. However, in the interest of my sagging eyelids, I will take this opportunity to bring it to a close. More to come, faithful readers, I promise.

Cheers!