Leaping Before Looking
12/28/16
Guest blogger Claire Nitschke aspires to be a sommelier. Since she graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2016 she’s been taking steps to make her dream come true. I think she has a lot of gumption. What do you think?
On her blog, www.claireseats.com, she writes about her first adventure in wine country.
They say to look before you leap. They say to not cry over spilled milk. They lack adventure and passion. I had the opportunity to work my first harvest in Oregon with Larry Stone, one of the nation’s most renowned sommeliers and wine educators. Hesitation was not an option.
I did not look, I leapt, bounded, boarded the plane and could not even picture in my mind where I was going. I had never been to Oregon before. Never seen an American vineyard before. Never volunteered for a job I knew nothing about before. But that is exactly where you go and what you do when you find out Larry Stone (!!!) needs volunteers for his first harvest at Lingua Franca in Willamette Valley, Oregon.
As the novice wine enthusiast, whispers of Master Sommeliers were always just out of my conceptual understanding. I knew that it was hard, very hard, to become a MS; I knew that there are only 230 humans to earn the title, 147 humans humans in the Americas, of those 23 American women. The whispers told me Larry had passed his Master Som test in one go. I was fairly certain this feat was almost unheard of. So with a vague understanding of who this man was and what he was asking me to do, I set out on the vineyard phase of my wine adventure.
Portland is a bustling mecca of food, culture, drug addicts, and beauty. Amity it is not. Amity is rural America with mountains and farmlands, one corner store, a fancy restaurant, and kids going to small schools with classmates they’ve known their entire lives. It is wonderful in its own right. And it has the luxury and curse of being in the middle of the wine boom in Oregon.
My compadres and I stayed in a little 3-bedroom house in Amity and made the drive over to the winery every morning. Myself, two from Cayman Islands, two from Austria, and a Frenchman staying at another location were joined daily by local wine makers custom crushing at the facility, Larry, his daughter Siri, Thomas the wine maker, and our main man Bernard who made us our lunches. Long days, physical labor, and love of wine brought us together.
Lingua Franca was a construction site. While it was close to being finished, when you are in the middle of a huge harvest, nearly finished is close to barely started. Temporary wiring, mysterious tubes, unfinished walls made the work interesting; even half of the floor was not poured yet. Have no fear, some days we were able to squeeze out 14-hour work days sorting 24 tons of grapes unfazed by construction.
Sometimes monotonous work, sometimes therapeutic, sometimes we were hung over, but every time the shake table was our marching beat, the destemmer our pace setter, and stink bugs and earwigs our constant companions.
Day one I was thinking about how they say a job worth doing is worth doing well. Worried I would miss one pruned cluster, overlook an unripe grape, or somehow ruin the entire tank of wine in the time it took the grapes to travel down the shake table into the destemmer.
By day two, there was a system, I knew what to do, how to spot the bad grapes. I felt like Saint Peter. I passed judgment on who would make it to the pearly gates and be allowed to fulfill the highest glory of becoming wine, and who were turned away, bound for compost. This heightened the sense of divinity I attributed to the work. It helped me get through the constant stream of grapes.
In the evening, we cleaned. Cleaning was a huge operation. We hosed, we squeegeed, we power washed, we unstacked, we restacked, we slept well.
The people were some of the best. The generosity was a quality no one I met there was lacking. We shared benchmark wines at lunch, shared David and Larry’s collections of magnums and champagne with dinner, and were never left thirsty.
Harvest and the physical passing of time it represents came at a time of change for myself as well. We celebrated my 23rd birthday under the stacked barrels, with celebration napkins, champagne, wines, and great spirits.
No longer in school, fostering my interest in wine, a loose plan plan to move to NYC, this harvest transformed the last year of hard work into must that will turn itself into wine and marked a new chapter of my life. I was feeling melancholia and didn’t want to stop. It happened that Stephan, an Austrian wine maker, was working the harvest at Lingua Franca until his own harvest starts in a few weeks. The conversation came up, and the deal was done. After Oregon I will be going to Austria to work the harvest in the Old World at a family winery.
Lingua Franca was the first place I sipped still fermenting wine, the first place I stomped whole cluster grapes with my bare feet, the first place I met some of the people I hope to know the rest of my life. I will always remember this trip as my first harvest. It was the wind that fanned the flame and I officially caught the wine bug.