Where's the wine?

So, riddle me this, Batman: I moved from Wall Street to wine, yet I've worked harder and drank less wine since I started working at the winery two weeks ago than I ever did on Wall Street.  Don't get me wrong -- I've worked long hours in Sales & Trading, too.  Living on the West Coast, I used to wake up at 3:15AM to make it to the office in time for our 4:15AM (7:15AM EST) conference call with headquarters.  Even when we got an analyst in the LA office, and I would make her get to work by 4:15AM so that I could sleep an extra 15 minutes and listen to the call in my car, I still got into work by 4:30.  By the time I worked for my most recent investment bank, though, I had mastered the early hours.  Not only was our call at a blessed 5:30AM, but I had wised up and would listen to the call while showering, with my Blackberry tucked into the soap alcove on mute.  But back when I was first starting out, and my liver was still intact, I would get in at 4:30ish, work the full trading day, leave around 3PM, maybe head to the gym, and then meet my clients at a bar around 5PM for a drink before going to dinner, followed by a concert or game, followed by drinks into the wee hours before I would grab an hour of sleep and wake up again at 3:15AM.  And my boss at Bank of America told me he expected us salespeople to take clients out 4 nights a week.  So, while my liver got a workout, the only physical exercise I got all day at work was the lifting of phone to ear or wine glass to mouth.


At the winery in the past week and a half, I've worked consecutive 12-14 hour days on my feet.  When I arrived, I think they broke me in a bit easy: days started at 8AM as harvest hadn't started yet, and we were still preparing the winery to receive fruit.  This was mainly comprised of us interns washing large bins for contracted fruit and small bins (also known as "fucking yellow bins" or "FYBs") to prepare for picking and sorting.  Well, the anticipation is long over.  We started picking our Chardonnays a week ago, and we haven't come up for air since.  Days start at 6 or 6:30AM and don't end till 7 or 8PM, with no rest for my old bones.  When we're not sifting through spiders, leaves, earwigs, and damaged fruit from our Chardonnay grapes, we're cleaning tanks to prepare for the juice, or pumping it into a tank, or pumping it out of a tank into a barrel, or walking through the vineyards to sample fruit to see if it's ready, or rolling barrels around the winery, or cleaning old barrels to be sold or used again.  I feel as though I'm seeing parts of the big picture, but still don't understand.  I would liken it to being a novice chef asked to help cook a 20-course meal in a hectic kitchen, but who keeps getting pulled off the line to work on a different dish, thereby never seeing how anything's completed.  It's overwhelming and confusing and physically exhausting.  In fact, I think my knuckles have muscles now, but I can't tell since I can't close my hands into fists anymore.  Somewhere between day 7 and 8, I got too tired to chew dinner and contemplated eating only soft foods such as pâté, oatmeal, and toothpaste.  I wake up with random bruises I notice sleepily in the bathroom mirror, and a myriad of cuts have colonized on my hands, which I notice when they sting like hell from our cleaning chemicals, e.g. citric acid, which is basically like squeezing lemon juice on paper cuts.  And just today, I had to create a siphon to clean small hoses, which meant I had to suck peroxy (a cleaner used for its bleaching qualities), citric acid, and a liquid sanitizer called Lancer until each chemical started flowing through the tubes freely.  So, I now either have the world's cleanest lungs, or I will very shortly cough one up.

A fraction of the FYBs we wine interns clean to prepare for picking and sorting

So, is it all worth it?  Am I too much of a weak-ass,  desk-jockey banker to make it in the labor-intensive world of a wine intern?  I'm not sure yet, but after working so many hours non-stop, I have to admit my first feelings of discouragement.  I am so tired.  I can't help thinking back to my days of fancy wine tastings on a corporate card or banker's salary, rubbing elbows with towel-waving Burgundians.  Contrast this with becoming a human siphon for chemical stain removers, and you'll understand my current state of mind.

At a wine dinner in New York with Aubert de Villaine and Jean-Marc Roulot

Just a few of the DRCs at dinner that night 

I also can't help feeling like a major moron!  I'm struggling with wine machine terminology (sump?  valve?  gasket?  reducer?  baffle?), not to mention how to put things together, take them apart, and clean them properly.  Most winery machines resemble Dr. Seuss "Cat in the Hat" contraptions, with the downside of improper handling leading to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wine if machinery is not properly sanitized or connected.  But learning on Wall Street was tough, too -- especially in my world of structured products (aka "toxic assets").  I sold ABS, RMBS, CMBS, INVs, IIOs, IOs, POs, CBOs, CDOs, CLOs, and CMOs with names like BOAMS, BOAA, and BOALT.  No wonder Congress is so confused.  Anyway, I guess it just means I should cut myself some slack on the learning curve.  I ultimately would like to end up on the business side of wine, rather than the production side, but this experience so far has been unforgettable and has given me a whole new respect for winemakers.  I just hope I make it to week three.  Week two has been a doozy, my friends...