What Being a Winemaker Actually Looks Like (After 48 Vintages)

Being a winemaker has been billed as a sexy job, and most days it does not feel that way.

The mental picture is tasting wine, talking to adoring customers, and eating food and wine pairings day after day. The reality is closer to running any other small business: hiring and managing personnel, talking to insurance agents and accountants, ordering glass, and trying to keep dozens of small decisions from getting in the way of the one thing the job is really about, which is making wine.

I do not want this to sound like a complaint. I love the work. But the gap between the perception and the reality is wide enough that it is worth describing.

The Spreadsheet Side

Most weeks have more spreadsheet hours than barrel hours.

Glass orders alone have become a project in themselves. Lead times have stretched. The bottles we used to order one season and receive the next are now booked a year ahead, and the supplier landscape keeps shifting. Multiply that by barrel orders, by corks, by labels, by every other piece of physical inventory, and you start to see why a winemaker's calendar looks like a logistics manager's.

There is hiring and crew management, particularly during harvest. There is talking to contractors, architects, and landlords when a tasting room is in motion. There is the bureaucratic side of working in a federally regulated industry, including TTB filings, label approvals, and the steady drip of compliance work. Every small business owner reading this is nodding along.

The Actual Winemaking Calendar

In any given month, there is real winemaking happening alongside the office work.

In late winter and early spring, Mandy and I rack the previous year's reds post-malolactic fermentation. Right now, for example, our focus is getting the wines ready for spring bottling. That means tasting trials for alcohol, acidity, and astringency. The whites are the most demanding piece of that work because they have more stability issues than reds, so we run protein stability and cold stability trials and adjust accordingly. Additions get made. The wines settle. Then they get filtered and bottled.

The Oriana and Abracadabra Rosé are usually the first wines from the previous vintage to bottle, with releases timed for the spring.

Blending Season

April through August is when my favorite work of the year happens: blending the reds.

It starts with Solesce. Solesce always goes first because it gets the pick of the cellar. Whatever Solesce wants, Solesce gets. I pull samples from every barrel that might contribute, taste through them, and build the blend from the top down. Once Solesce is set, I work through every other red, one at a time. By the time I am done, every barrel in the cellar has a destination.

Step two is putting the blends together physically. We pull the chosen barrels down off the racks, rack them into a tank, mix the components, and then return the blended wine to barrel. From there, the wine rests another year before bottling.

The blending work usually runs into July or August before harvest gets started again.

And Then Harvest

Trips to the vineyard start in earnest in late summer. We pull samples, run analysis, talk to growers, and watch the weather. Then it is the first day of crush, and the calendar evaporates for two months.

This year is my 48th vintage in Washington. Still having fun. Still working hard. Still making Washington wine.

What It Adds Up To

The blending decisions made on a quiet morning in May are the ones you taste in your glass three years later. The glass order placed in February is the bottle in your hand. None of the spreadsheet work shows up on a label, but all of it is in the wine.

The next time you pour a bottle of Solesce or Byzance, the part you cannot see is most of the job.

Cheers, Brian