I might as well use a cartoon woodpecker as a drill. Much to my beautiful wife's delight, the primary manufacturing facility is now covered in a giant blue tarp that has a large enough pool of water on it to raise a Beluga. It does serve to waylay the indoor rains that were threatening to ruin all of my tools but really it's the menacing impermanence of the entire set up that is of deeper concern. It is so friggin' tight in there, I am moving my hips like a hula dancer navigating my way to the screw gun. Dippin' and divin'.
But I'm a lucky guy! I am making some more Skuk benches for my all time favorite furniture store in NYC, Regeneration. I am trying to build four of them out of my shemp shop. Luckily I just threw away all my jigs about a month ago. That means I can make new better ones! That is what I was doing today, in the rain. the wonderful rain.
The vintage was all consuming this year. It was both frenetic and fun as ever. We smashed the winery record for the most grapes processed in a day. Previous record was 76 tons and we hit 96! All the grapes came at once. A purple hailstorm. It is like a five year old boy's dream job. Driving a forklift, dumping 1/2 ton bins of grapes in a hopper, squirting water all over the place, getting barefoot and digging out tanks, cleaning the press!
Cleaning the inside of the press is one of the craziest things. You gotta try it. Squeezing your weary shitass into the press cavity and muscling the huge rubber bladder around is not a normal task. The deflated bladder is like a grape skin covered dead walrus smashing against your face. Sometimes I couldn't tell if we were fighting or making love.
Here are a couple of undercover movies I took with my Cybershot:
And there is always the thought that the tank might roll and bisect you or someone could knock the air on by mistake and turn you into a million tiny extrusions.
bi·sect
[v. bahy-sekt, bahy-sekt; n. bahy-sekt] 
Show IPA
Show IPA–verb (used with object)
1.
to cut or divide into two equal or nearly equal parts.
Tank Digout:
Good news, A to Z 2008 Pinot Noir just got a 90 point rating from the Wine Spectator which put them in the top 100 wines of '08! I helped make that!
No comments:
Post a Comment