Wine Workers: Those Who Shower At Night

I lent the book out to my grandfather and haven’t received it back yet, so I couldn’t give you the exact quote. But in the great book by Benjamin Wallace, The Billionaire’s Vinegar, at one point, he talks about how rich connoisseurs of great wine would visit the winemaker’s home with verticals* in tow of their greatest wines. The winemakers are invariably floored: not only have they never tried a vertical of the wines they made, but they often cannot afford the very wines they make.

My aunt commented on a photo of me that surfaced on Facebook, surrounded by barrels and looking slightly unimpressed at the photographer. “I didn’t know you worked in heaven!” she wrote.

Last year, I excitedly told my sisters that in my cellar job, I’d be working for $15, and get an even bigger raise than that in the new year. Bless their hearts, they responded with unsure gazes. “That’s more money than I’ve ever earned, you guys,” I told them, ensuring them that they could sway their responses to the positive. I could tell they hadn’t known how to respond; was that good or bad? (They’ve both worked their asses off into great careers with salaries, benefits and paid vacation. One sister even has an intern.)

There is cognitive dissonance between several of these narratives.

The average cellar rat, vineyard worker, or even winemaker falls into the category of your typical labourer — who just happens to have a highly specific skill attached. I heard someone say once, “There are two types of people: those who shower when they wake up, and those who shower when they get home.” Wine industry workers are of the latter type.

During harvest in particular, we work long, long hours, often in excess of 12 hours and weeks without a day off. We return home from work often sweaty and very dirty, grim under the nails that won’t budge. We can be identified by our dark purple stained hands and aversion to the light for being stuck in the cellar so long.

Some jobs are very reasonably compensated but many are not. And this is the juxtaposition one finds oneself in: an industry with a sometimes highly expensive product, certainly one with an aura of grandeur and status, is made by some of the lower paid workers in society.

I won’t pretend I haven’t met my share of wine snobs, and I’m sure I’ll meet many more. But I think this is the source of much frustration among those who actually handle the grapes and make the wine: most of us aren’t snobs! More often than not you’ll find us drinking beer after work, not wine (again, especially at harvest). We appreciate and drink lots of wine (getting high off our own supply, as they say), but we are often just as happy with something fizzy and simple.

Is this ironic, or is it exactly as it should be? Should wine be the domain of the rich and privileged few, or does it entirely make sense that it is made by essentially enlightened peasants?

Living in the age of information as we are, I see no reason to continue this divide, which serves nothing except the egos of well-dressed businessmen, the type that have a bottle of cognac kept behind a glass display case at his favourite high end restaurant to impress his best clients.

Wine snobbery needs to die, and it has begun to rot at its very roots, with those who make it first. May the wreckage continue.

Currently drinking:

Lagunitas Wilco Tango Foxtrot (WTF) Ale; California & Chicago — it takes a lot of beer to make good wine.

*A vertical is a term for a group of bottles of wine, all the same wine but from different vintages, often in a row: e.g., 2001, 2002, 2003. Likewise, different wines from the same vintage in a grouping is called a horizontal, but this term isn’t used as often.

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