Sorting Grapes- The New Daily Grind

Today, we sorted grapes. Here's what that means: grapes come into the warehouse (or in this case out back of the warehouse) in half ton heavy plastic bins. On a forklift, a bin is hauled around and dumped into a metal hopper on the side of a conveyor belt. We stand alongside the conveyor belt sorting through the grapes and picking out leaves, grasshoppers, twigs, moldy bunches, unripe bunches, and pieces of whatever the harvesters had for lunch that day- today was pistachios. The grapes come to us in tight bunches, the grapes so ripe and sweet they look like blueberries. Another thing that comes with the grapes is earwigs. Lots and lots and lots of earwigs. It took about five minutes to get completely desensitized to them. We stand around the table sorting through the grapes in the sun (under goofy "Torres Vineyard" red and yellow striped umbrellas that make a wine-making operation look like a hot dog stand) sticky with juice, grapes strewn everywhere, earwigs crawling around our clothes and up our arms. Yesterday, I told Henry I'd give him three bucks if he ate an earwig. "Five bucks" he said. "Five for two, three for one". And he grabbed two fat ones and popped them in his mouth without blinking. I still owe him five bucks. After that, he made five bucks again for the guy who missed it and wanted to see him eat earwigs. And then after that, for whatever reason, nobody was paying him anymore, he kept eating them. Every once in a while, when he'd see an earwig on the conveyor belt, he'd grab it and say "Wow, that's a fat one!" and pop it into his mouth.

Anyway, after the grapes go past us on the conveyor belt, they're dumped into a machine that perfectly and mysteriously knocks the grapes off of the stems, spits out grapes on one side and stems on the other. The whole time we're sorting, we're also forklifting new bins of grapes, emptying buckets of juice, pouring dry ice over grapes to preserve them until the go into the fermentation tanks later that day and to kick off the fermentation by adding CO2, dumping bins of compost into the back of a super ghetto pickup which we later take up a hill and dump into a compost heap, cleaning parts of the machine that collect grape scum, skins and earwigs, hosing things off, all the while, telling the most distasteful jokes and puns, the kind of jokes that are only funny after a few hours of standing under the sun doing manual labor with a group of guys in their twenties. Really really nasty jokes.

I learned how to drive a forklift and then to dump and stack bins of grapes with it- which is like learning how to heard cattle riding a hummingbird. Super fun. After the day was mostly over, I got my driving lesson and then spent ten minutes lining myself up with a stack of bins, hoisting the new bin up, fumbling with the controls, dumping the bin when I hoped to raise it, tilting it up, tilting it back down again overcorrecting, tried to come in a little closer, stalled it, turned it back on, and then ever so carefully lowered the bin onto the 12 foot stack and nudged it into place. I slowly, carefully pulled out and then turned around to my posse clapping, after having suspensfully watched the whole process.

Same tomorrow. And the day after that and the day after that. I was told I could expect 20 to 30 days of work without a weekend. I think this last sunday was my last day off in a while.