The End of Something. Ruminations on Crush 2009

While on “lunch”, sitting under the coal black dark skies of an unusually cool September Sonoma night, a veteran lab tech took off his nicotine patch, cuffed his weathered hands close to his face and lit a short filter-less Camel. Before he could fully exhale, he wrapped his same weather beaten hands around a perspiring can of Bud Light and exclaimed, “It takes a lot of shitty beer to make good wine”.

Ed pulled hard on his cigarette and regaled us young aspiring winemakers cum cellar rats on the intricacies of the business, but mostly lambasting past and present winemakers who were also his bosses. “It sounds very sexy”, he says of wine making. “If you don’t know any better, it is easy to romanticize”. We laugh and all nod in agreement, our necks soar and stringy from carrying hoses and gamma jets around the vineyard all day. “I mean you meet a girl at the bar and you tell her you work in the wine business and it sounds mysterious and interesting. And she asks where you work and being mysterious you reply, Sonoma. And you can tell from her smile and her unforgiving gaze that she is truly interested. And she wants to know what your work actually consists of, so you tell her that you run lab tests on wine, checking ph levels, inoculating yeast strains, measuring brix, and occasionally swirling the glass and sometimes swallowing but mostly spitting. And she smiles half wittingly as you say this. And you tell her you are a Sr. Lab Tech and of course being from Northern California herself, she has a friend or an ex or a neighbor who is … was a lab tech. And as her smile fades you know that she knows that you make around 50k a year.”

Ed lights another cigarette from the butt of his Camel and passes around the beers. “I should have stayed in pharmaceuticals.” The magic ceased to be magic. Ed confirmed what I had suspected to be truth. I already knew I would not go with the rest of the guys to work the 2010 crush. I did not know too much about Ed..that he worked more harvests than most people at the vineyard, that he had two kids, that he may or may not have been divorced once…twice, that he had a small place in Santa Rosa that he may own but probably rents. I liked Ed and I liked wine but I knew I did not want to become Ed. And no one plans to become Ed but the more and more time I spend hanging around Sonoma, the more Ed’s I meet.

I looked down at my own hands, which were hard and dry and stained with juice, and felt glad I was holding a cold can of beer in one of them. I sat perched on top of the old wooden picnic table in silence taking in large breathes of Sonoma earth mixed with recycled Camel carbon and watched the bats fluttering around against a speckled mountainous backdrop that stared into oblivion and I wondered what the bats looked like in New Zealand.