Harvest Week 1a: Training

I wish I could report a more exciting Week 1 - but it was mostly filled with corporate culture, health & safety, and general best practice trainings - all riveting stuff. Most topics are fairly intuitive and not entirely new from my time in California a few years ago. The scale here is quite large though, comparatively. This harvest, we are aiming to process around 17 tons of grapes at our site alone, but there will be another 60+ tons across the various Indevin-owned wineries across NZ. Stonestreet (CA winery) was fewer than 5 tons, so laying eyes on a massive 225,000 liter tank for the first time here was quite a shock. We'll be producing ~85% sauvignon blanc, which was what Marlborough is known for, with the remainder made up of Chardonnay (sparking included) Pinot Gris, Riesling, Pinot Noir, and Rose.

There's about 40 of us seasonal workers and ~15 permanent staff in the cellar. One of the coolest parts of this experience so far is meeting folks from all corners of the world. There's one other American, a few Kiwis, and scatterings of adventurers from Argentina, Uruguay, Spain, France, Hungary, Czech Republic, Malaysia, Taiwan, Ireland...you get the idea. A couple of the Argentinian's (one goes by "Ostin" - same pronunciation) included me the Argentinian maté-tea sharing circle, which is supposedly a hallmark of South American social culture. No big deal, friends with the cool kids already. I'm sure I'll have more to report on my specific job duties starting in Week 2!