Vineyard workers and wine tasters

Hi! I've been wanting to write a blog for a long time about what we actually do at the vineyard and give you an update on some of the wineries we have visited... but first of all - I think it is important to notify you of how we have been spoiled by our employer (Pernod Ricard, who owns Montana Brancott and is the second largest wine and spirits company in the world). It is common custom in NZ for employers to occasionally treat their employees to a few hours of paid work to drink....beer. Free beer. Free beer on a Friday afternoon when no one has good work ethics anyway. So why not recognize that and bribe them into thinking they are the best employers ever because they give you free beer. Why is it that this custom has not been adopted in the USA? We think action is called for so this custom will be common by the time we return to the states. O.K.? Work on that folks. =)

Now - onto the wire lifting. What we do all day, for 8 hours, is walk up and down and up and down rows of vines. There are usually two or three wires that start out the season on the ground, well below the vines. As the vines start to grow, the wire lifters briskly walk and lift them up to a wooden pole with nails in it. We place each wire on the lowest nails....and the vines are pushed up and together - "nice and tidy" as our supervisor would say. Then the damn vines keep growing like a freakin' jungle (see the photo to the left, this is a tame example) and we have to go back to the same rows a few weeks later to do a "second lift" - simply lifting and moving the wires up to the next highest nails. The "final lift" is for tall folks or men with strong biceps only - because you are now lifting the wires completely over your head (for the most part) to the top nails on the post. Sometimes the jungle vines have gone completely mad and grown too fast for us to keep up. This creates tunnels of vines as they fall over the wires and reach for the ground - and you have to grab someone (like strong Jay) to help you lift the vines and any freed wires back up to the post. Certain people (Jay and other members of the male species) can lift these tunnel vines on their own, but alas, the only woman on the team (Julie) never seemed quite capable of fighting the tunnel vine curse on her own. Erghhh.

We actually just finished the final lift on all the portions of the vineyard our team is responsible for (see the photo to the left for an example of a "tidy" row). So, starting today we began "leaf thinning." This is fairly straight forward....all we do is wander down the rows and pluck off the leaves that are surrounding the grapes. They do this to increase the amount of sun that hits the grapes. Depending on how the winemaker wants his or her wine to taste, they tell us what percentage of the leaves to pluck off. For example, we are doing a 90-100% pluck right now on Riesling vines. This will eventually make the grapes quite sweet and these grapes will be harvested for a dessert wine (yummy).

We plan on working for another 3 weeks, including this week - and then we will be done (yipee!) and ready to travel for the remainder of our trip. This is a good thing because our brains are turning to smoosh while our muscles get quite the workout (as Jay demonstrates to the left).

WINE TASTING UPDATE: When I left off, I was raving about Lawsons Dry Hills, Saint Clair, and Mount Riley. I still hold these wineries in very high regard, so don't forget about them! Of all the wineries we have been too, Lawsons has remained my favorite. We have been to about 12 more wineries since our last wine blog update. Where to begin? Cloudy Bay gets a lot of hype for a lot of O.K. wine. None of their wine bottles were under $29 NZ and none of their wine was worth it (in my opinion). I think people there are interested in buying the label more than the wine. Although, I did think their Chardonnay (2005) was darn good. By far, my favorite from this batch of tastings was a little family-run winery called Bladen. You can't find it in the states, but you can get it in Singapore! Wanna come and visit us there to sip some excellent wine together? They had a great red blend (Malbec/Merlot) that blew us away. We also loved their Gewurztraminer and Pinot Noir. Another winner was yet another small winery owned by the Bourgeois family (no joke) called Clos Henri. They produce only Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, and they put a lot of French energy into their wines, you can taste it. This is the only cellar door (aside from Lawsons) where we actually left with wine in hand. These folks are not afraid to age their Sauvignon Blanc, whereas the rest of New Zealand seems to think if the wine is over a year old it will not be good anymore. The Clos Henri 2004 Sauv. Blanc is the best we have had yet. Other stand outs that might be really hard to find in the USA include Mahi and Wither Hills. We liked everything these wineries gave us to taste, although the 2006 Pinot Noir from Wither Hills was gorgeous (I sound like a real wine snob now). Also of interest is the wine produced by our winery - Montana Brancott. We have been wine tasting there again and discovered that some of their wine is actually quite good. We also learned that their wine is sold under the Brancott label in the USA, not the Montana label as I may have mentioned in an earlier blog. We love their Ormand 2004 Chardonnay, dripping with oak. Yum. We have nothing bad to say about Matua, Fromm, or Villa Maria. All decent wines that we would buy and happily drink, but nothing really stood out. I'll leave on a little environmental note with Grove Mill wines. This is the first NZ winery to be 100% carbon neutral. They have converted some of their land back to wetlands, they have neat energy efficient buildings, and they buy carbon credits to make up for the energy they cannot avoid using in the process of making wine. Their wine though, wasn't half as cool as their ideals. I'd still buy it and drink it anyway in a salute to a company that is concerned about global climate change.