Cellar Day!

Overhead Lines

I had the day off on Monday and Tuesday.  In this past month I have not had a full work week, so I am running out of ideas to entertain myself.  Since I did go to college for winemaking, I want to learn how to do things in the cellar.  Sooo, on my day off, I went to work.  But instead of working in the lab, I was a cellar rat for a day.  

Greg, the cellar master, had me working with Quentin, the Frenchie.  He was my teacher for the day, I was his shadow.  Our first task, red ferment baume round.  Quentin looked at me, "I don't know how to do that."  But, since I am a lab person, baume rounds are my thang.  Fail on learning something, I became teacher for the first task!!! But everything after that consisted of things I did not know. 

The Chiller

We had to set up lines to cool a tank (stop a fermentation) then we had to set up lines to heat another tank for despatch.  I guess you have to bottle wine at something around 18 degrees celsius, and it started around 14 degrees.  Dragging around the hoses is a bit more difficult than it looks.  Also looking for connections is a bitch.  The connections on the hoses and such are either female or male so you have to make sure they line up correctly.  There are some "double female" and "double male" connections to help out with this situation.  From the stories I heard from the cellar casuals, finding the double females and double males was a close to impossible task during the heart of vintage.  

With the heating and cooling, I learned how to navigate the over head pipes from the tank farm to the cellar to the cooling/heating unit to the red wine area.  They seemed intimidating at first, but after a little bit of thinking, they make sense and are very simple.  

The Heater.

I also got to transfer some malolactic culture to some red ferments using a flow meter.  (NOTE: Things like the "flowmeter" and "sulphotometer" were words that I heard the cellar people saying and never knew what they looked like until I actually worked in the cellar.  It was nice to put an object to a name.)  I had to even use the walkie talkie to communicate (bad ass)!

I also did the super fun task of cleaning a tank.  I set up lines for the tankers coming in the following day.  I even had a blonde moment (which I guess was the theme for the vintage) and accidentally set up a transfer half on one tank and half on another tank…whoops.   

Working in the cellar also made me miss the cellar people more once they left.  I now understand more of their jokes and mistakes and frustrations.  Good times, good times.  

The Tank Farm