After 15 sedentary years as a freelance journalist, wine consultant, and wine educator in Vancouver and Ottawa, I find myself finally living what I’ve been writing and teaching. With a 50th birthday just around the corner, I packed up my laptop and moved to California wine country in Santa Barbara County, about 240 breathtakingly beautiful clicks up the coast from Los Angeles.
Officially, I work “in production” at Babcock Winery in the Santa Rita Hills wine region, but the colloquial term for my position is “cellar rat.” Fortunately, there is no actual cellar involved. Instead, it’s day after glorious day in the California sunshine, learning the fine art of winemaking, and living out every wine lover’s dream.
The area is so beautiful with the marine layer ("sea smoke") rolling in every late afternoon and burning off in the morning. I have a ten-minute drive to work through mist-covered hills with shafts of sunlight breaking through here and there. It's so pretty, it sometimes makes me want to cry.
The area is so beautiful with the marine layer ("sea smoke") rolling in every late afternoon and burning off in the morning. I have a ten-minute drive to work through mist-covered hills with shafts of sunlight breaking through here and there. It's so pretty, it sometimes makes me want to cry.
The people I work with are amazing and welcomed me with open arms. In fact, they were ecstatic to have someone else to share the workload, as they've been shorthanded in the current tough economic times. For the 2 years before I arrived, the actual entire production team (apart from the vineyard staff who do their own thing) consisted of 2 people, Ron Hill, the Associate Winemaker, and Colin Kress, the Assistant Winemaker. Apparently, the rule of thumb is to have one production/cellar person for every 5,000 cases of wine a winery produces, so Colin and Ron have been stretched pretty thin at Babcock's current 20,000-case production.
The work is very physical, and it's taken some getting used to after 15 years of sitting at a computer or in a classroom. After getting home from work for the first 2 weeks, I couldn't stay awake long enough to actually eat dinner. For several weeks after that, I was asleep by 8 or 9pm. I'm a little more used to it now, but everything aches all the time, and I'm a mass of cuts and bruises. On the plus side, I'm getting to be a physical force to be reckoned with, and am now tossing those full 7-gallon carboys around like nothing, where I couldn't even budge them in the first weeks.
It's still winter here, but spring is just around the corner and plum trees are blossoming. Winter has meant more rain than usual (we can go for months here without seeing a drop), which has turned the hills a beautiful green. Temperatures are in the mid to high teens during the day, but there's a nasty cold wind a lot of the time which is a characteristic of the Santa Rita Hills.
Sea Smoke Vineyard in summer: Santa Rita Hills
As for the work in the winery, harvest is long over and the wines are developing nicely. We've got some bottling coming up, and we're now occupied with several projects to get ready for that, but more on that next time. Til then, thanks for looking in on my "Eat, Drink, Pray I Don't Throw My Back Out" adventure so far!
