March 01, 2004

In the Cellars:

At the end of last week a huge truck pulled into the winery’s main courtyard and delivered 40,000 empty Schlegel bottles. The palettes are stacked two stories high and form a massive wall of bottles.

The arrival of the bottles means that it is time to bottle the wine, and the winery is abuzz with activity as everyone prepares for the marathon bottling session that will last for two days this week. We have a modern automated bottling machine, but the bottling process still requires a certain amount of hands on labour. The empty bottles must be placed on one end of the machine, and full bottles then taken off the other end and placed into boxes for distribution. Everyone at the winery pitches in and works in shifts to feed to voracious bottling machine. It can be rather mundane work, but our efforts are rewarded as we finally hold in our hands the newly bottled vintage, ready to be opened and enjoyed.

In the Vineyards:

Work in the vineyards is progressing at a good pace as we prepare the vines for the upcoming growing season. Although the annual cycle of vineyard work has no real beginning or end, it is possible to think of this time of year as the start of the upcoming growing season.
At this time of year, the rows of dormant vines appear to be a barren, tangled mass of tendrils and fruit bearing canes.

Our objective is to select a single cane from each vine that will act as the main support for all the new growth in the coming season. Everything else must be cut and cleared away. To achieve this, we group our workers into teams and move through the vineyard in waves, with each successive team completing a specific specialized task. The first team to move through the vineyard consists of Matthias and Caspar, armed with high powered pneumatic clippers connected to a generator by a 200 meter long cable. They are professional vineyard men, and they have been trained to quickly identify the optimal cane to support the growth for the coming season. The selection criteria they use is varied, but generally involves the length (1 meter is best) and age (2 years is best) of the cane, as well as concerns of the overall architecture of the vine. Once they identify the optimal cane, they use their clippers to sever all other growth from the main stem or trunk of the vine.They then move on to the next vine leaving the tangled mass of severed growth clinging to the wires upon which it had been trained.

Following closely behind Matthias and Caspar is the team responsible for pulling down all the severed growth. This is the most physically demanding work, and a strong back and good pair of gloves are the main tools needed to fulfil this task. The members of this team also carry small pruning shears, however, as the canes that were recently severed from their stem still tend to cling tenaciously to the wires. When they are finished, a single cane reaches out from the trunk of the vine and reaches towards the sky.