No Adventures Today. Just Life As Usual. (Post finished from last Thurs.)

Today was a pretty normal day. I forgot to set my alarm clock after a late night. (At our least social we usually travel to Paonia once a week for ultimate frisbee, and last night we went to get pizza and a beer at Louie's after the game. Conversation was good and it doesn't help the sleep schedule that Paonia is so bloody far away...) I woke up ten minutes before we were supposed to be at work* and munched down a quick experimental bagel (I tried making them for the first time two nights ago, and they were pretty tasty, though a bit dry, too plain and generally not well-formed (dough not wet enough?).) before putting on my nasty work clothes - three days aged by this morning. A quick blob of sunscreen and I was on my way to work.

(Note: I'm finishing a post I started 5 days ago. The following may be somewhat inaccurate and/or hard to follow due to its pieced-together nature.) The morning's work consisted of finishing our first course of field stones that would mark the inaugural work done on the foundations of our future biodynamic storehouse/prepaaration building. This involved mixing lots of mortar in wheelbarrow (We later switched to concrete to defray costs and because we decided that our wall was so friggin' big - 2 feet thick - that it would never fall down, even despite the switch.), hauling huge loads of field stones with the tractor bucket (I love hydraulics!), and carefully laying our stones and mortar into the space that our slipforms allowed. Good times. That first day, we (I at least) made the mistake of not using gloves, yet continuing to smear mortar and concrete around with my bare hands, thereby exposing them to goodness knows what chemicals... and shriveling them up like prunes. (Also, the skin on my forearms and hands all flaked off and fell of over the next two days.) Later I used gloves. All the while we worked, my iPod encouraged us with a great variety of music and news podcasts ranging from James Brown to Led Zeppelin to NPR's Talk of the Nation.


After finishing the first course, we went in to (as usual) raid the bosses' fridge, splurging and sparing not the least hunk of cheese, dollop of sour cream or scoop of ice cream. During the afternoon we needed to find something else to do, as the concrete was still hardening. Colin set about, moving rocks into the soupy mud path that was supposed to be the road between our house and the bosses'. Jonathan and I made the trek to the barn where we put the finishing touches on our second "sheep tractor." Unfortunately, this is not a large, hydraulic weed eater or furrow pulled by a team of sheep, but is rather a portable shelter for some soon-to-be-purchased sheep. Our pilot sheep tractor proved the concept, grazing sheep in between rows of grapes with the aid of a portable electric fence. Work on this was easy...ish. Really, we did little building as the structure - formerly a chicken coop - was already in existence. We just had to add runners: roughhewn 2 by 6's that we awkwardly bolted in the underlying framework. Key word: awkward. Picture a chicken coop, elevated with forks on a hydraulic tractor bucket (that lowered itself slowly onto us at a barely noticeable pace, in a manner that forced us to raise it back up every five minutes), with two guys drilling and saws-alling directly upward, a spray of dust, chicken crap, and angry earwigs flying into our scrunched up (and even protected with ear protectors, safety glasses and ball caps) faces. Yummy.

We finally finished near the end of our work day (usually between 4 and 5 pm), and Jonathan hauled the sheep tractor up to the winery while I checked the internets for a good local muffler shop. Have I mentioned that Guinevere's has fallen off (muffler, that is)? Or rather, the pipe that connects the catalytic converter to the muffler completely rusted through and fell off. Once I was all set to go, I headed up to the winery to help with the final sheep tractor installation process (and steal Jonathan so he could give me a ride back from the muffler shop). We got the job done and prepared to leave, only to find that my car wouldn't start. We tried to jump it with Colin's car, only to find that it still wouldn't start. I cursed my car under my breath... only to find that I was not going to the muffler shop that day. Oh well. I'll check the internets for some self-diagnosis tips for cars that won't start.

The internets weren't working. Cloud cover screwing up satellite internet? Could be. I was grounded here without my car, and I wanted my car to work again, so I packed up my laptop and made the trek back to the winery again, where the internet is better. I checked my email and searched some car repair forums (fora?) and then was completely surprised when Jonathan (who was at home - the one with the broken internets) popped up on gchat. "How did you get the internets to work?!?!" I typed with speed, despite my inability to abbreviate in the style of the internet speak of today. "The router was unplugged," was his reply. Hmmm... Oh well. Colin would soon be back from picking up more Quickcrete from Montrose, and we were all going to sample the aging wine later that evening anyway. I waited around, began this blog post, and twidled my thumbs.

Finally Jonathan and Colin came over, and we - with Lance (bossman)- sampled a sip from all of our currently-aging barrels of wine. (We also sampled the entirety of a bag of Cheetos and most of a bag of tortilla chips, much to the chagrin of Anna (bosswoman), the one who does the house shopping.) This was a very interesting process. We experienced the very distinct difference between the "free run" barrels and the "pressed" barrels - when the giant vats of fermenting grapes are moved to oak aging barrels, the weight of the grapes have already crushed them to the point where a barrel or two of wine can be obtained with no pressing. The result is a frutier, and - to my taste - thinner tasting wine. Beyond this, the press crushes the grapes to extract the remaining wine, and this pressed wine contains more tannins and other compounds found in the grapes' skins and seeds and has a fuller body. It was also interesting to taste the difference in wine from each grape variety, the from grapes of the same variety grown in differnt blocks, and the difference noted simply from barrel to barrel. During all of this, we were also treated to Lance's philosophical pitch for our particular method of winemaking, which is essentially "hands off." We don't innoculate, we don't add commercial yeast, we don't add other chemicals, we simply grow, pick, crush, ferment, age and bottle. And it's good stuff (that is, it works for us). The inner empiricist within me really wants to question and ask why and how, but that's not how Lance works. And I can accept that.

We returned home very late, after a meal graciously shared by Anna and the family. The Hansons are certainly among the most generous of people I have met. At home, I routinely surfed the (now-working) internets before crashing. Off to bed early again. Nothing special had happened. Another day in the life of Matthew the winery handiman...


I really can't end like that, though. All this is to say that my life has changed drastically since moving out here. And every day really is an adventure (even if it does at time contain hours on end of boring routine labor). My only mission for the present time is to enjoy every moment...

*-We try to begin working at 8 AM. We usually don't get over to the fields until 8:15.