Oh so I’ve climbed into this mess, have I?
Jesus and his bischon friese (or however it’s spelled)
Restacking 3,502 bottles
I was on the corking machine today; we were bottling Sangiovese (sacromonte 2009). I put a bottle in, pressed the foot pedal, the cork went in and the bottle burst. It was a defective bottle, it wasnt my fault or too full or a cork issue, but my right leg was soaked with wine; my foot squished when I walked. In a way, it was lucky I was wearing black tights and shorts. You can see a wavy line where the tights are wine-stained only if you look carefully. My chucks, however, came out with added character. One is light gray, the other is dark. I think I will spill wine on the clean one to make them even.
Today I went on a walk that was like a hike but not really and some of it was bushwhacking but that made me very ill at ease, for whatever reason, so I went back to the road, since wading in the river was too cold. Just like SF, the sun is hot hot but the shade is chilly. There was barely a cloud in the sky. I wrote down the different things I heard, but I am not good at distinguishing bird calls and I forgot to practice that at all. I should have. The cuckoo is common here so I just hear that one over and over. Apparently there’s a nightingale too but I don’t know it’s song. I only saw one snake, but I don’t think it was a viper, because it was black and gray. Did I tell you there are poisonous vipers here? Last week I scared up a baby one, luckily it was a baby otherwise I’d probably have gotten bit and had a trip to the hospital.
These are the sounds I heard today:
-lizards in the brush
-5-10 different bird calls
-that one snake slithering backwards back into his hole
-a horse that had a bell around it’s collar
-a chainsaw
-the echo of a car radio or a television somewhere
-two cars (not the one making a sound)
-bells from a nearby town at 10:57 and at 12:07 (I don’t think their time-keeping person is very good at accuracy)
-the river flowing
-one cricket
Today 4 of us bottled 3,400 bottles of Pinot noir (Piropo 2009). After about 1800 bottles, we discovered a cork problem - and all 1800 bottles that had been stored on their side needed to be flipped up so that the corks had time to expand. So our pretty good clip was cut by both figuring out what the fuck was going on (was it the corks? Was it the storage? Was it the new style bottles?) and then the unstacking and restacking.
At a certain point, while Uran and Charlotte were discussing the problem in Italian, I thought we might have to get corkscrews and remove 1800 corks, dump the wine back into the barrel, and send the bottles back to get sterilized (an epic nightmare, all steps). Such a relief when it was just restacking 1800 bottles of wine.
Cleaning the tubes pre-bottling
Tasting wine straight from the barrel (bottling tomorrow!) (Taken with instagram)
Castle guard dogs, coco & mini (Taken with instagram)
Working in the vineyarda