It was so long in fact it started yesterday afternoon.
In the morning, Sara and I empty and clean a bunch of barrels of wine, and construct the wall of barrels (see the picture on Picasa). When full these are practically unmoveable and empty I can just barely lift them (probably around 80lbs?). Apparently when Reto bought the vineyard from the Forbes family (yes like Forbes magazine) they didn't rehire the vintner. So out of spite, he took the corks out of all the full barrels, exposing the wine to the air and ruining it. So Sara and I put a giant metal bench straw in each barrel, and pump the wine into storage (where a vinegar factory buys it for centimes on the euro). We then roll it onto a rinsing machine, and put it in the wall. We did this for the entire storage cave (25 barrels) because its there where we are going to put the boxes of bottled wine.
After lunch, Sara and I started assembling boxes. We took flat boxes for 6 or 12 bottles of wine, Sara assembled the box, I rolled a single line of tape along the bottom leaving the top open and stacked the box. We then repeated this process five hundred times. (see the picasa photo, it's quite an impressive stack).
A quick side note for the other number nerds out there. We assembled 47 12-bottle boxes and 406 6-bottle boxes. If you think these numbers seem kinda arbitrary you're right. We just made them until we thought we had about enough. For those of you who haven't already worked out the math (47*12)+(406*6)=3000 bottles. Cool huh?
That night a friend of the family Tutu (He assured me the nickname was because of his last name, not his dancing attire), arrived to help with the bottling. He is a professional motorcycle coach, and is probably the most awesome person I've met abroad.
The day finally arrived and it felt like I was digging into a trench to fight a war. Either that or a line chef preparing for the dinner rush (I just finished Anthony Burdan's "Kitchen Confidential" [which I highly recommend] so this analogy came readily to mind). I made sure my station was ready: hundreds of boxes, date stamp with open ink pad, extra tape for my "scotcher", gate open on the trailer. No amount of preparation could have prepared me for what was about to happen.
Look at the video on picasa for some better info, but the division of labor was pretty simple: Jean-Se loaded bottles into the bottle-and-corker and performed quality control, Tutu loaded the full bottles onto the foil-and-labeler, Sara put the finished bottles into the boxes label up with dividers between the bottle, I closed the boxes, stamps the date, dotted "red wine" and loaded them into the trailer and Reto floated to wherever needed help (usually a pressure relief valve for Sara and I).
With a "let's rock" Reto blared American pop songs from the radio in the truck, Jean-Se pressed the 4 green buttons on the bottler simultaneously, and tutu lit up a cigarette. It took 30 seconds for the first bottles to get to my station, but I didn't stop moving after that. To give you perspective of how fast we had to move to keep up with the machines: my tape dispenser ran out of tape a couple of hundred boxes through, and the 30 seconds it took me to change out the rolls caused the entire process to come to a screeching halt.
After we fill the trailer (usually about 200 boxes) the whole process stops, we form a fire-brigade to empty the trailer into a cool dark cave we emptied yesterday morning. We then take a 10 minute coffee break and then the madness starts all over. From 8am to 7pm we put about 4,000 bottles of wine into boxes. Not bad for a days work.
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