Same Passion, Different Perspective: Miner Family intern, & my dear friend, Jenny Brown beautifully dishes on her endeavor in the valley.

I am a wine maker.

Ruby juice drips through my fingers and splatters my shirt during the pumpover. I taste the grenache... 7 days in tank, 4 days into fermentation, and the few berries that are left are the sweetest, most delicious, effervescent berry bombs of flavor. oh my god. It is happening. What I have been working and waiting for and it is just the beginning.
I am making wine.
Over the past 7 weeks I have moved from Sacramento to Napa, jumping tracks from wine retail to production, and I have been absorbing the behind the scenes cellar action of a 25,000 annual case production winery as if I was the driest sponge. (now moist. just for you mitchell.) As a harvest cellar worker for Miner Family Winery, I have been working with a well versed crew to prep and pamper the winery for this season’s crush.

I am absolutely freaking IN LOVE.

I’ve cleaned up bat poo, topped barrels with wine, sulfured barrels, power washed a plethora of bins (which I loved…felt like Rambo for a week and scored a sweet farmer tan!) sanitized tanks, hand polished the presses (over 16 hours of wax on/wax off), lugged hoses, cleaned, mastered a one-hand clamp, busted butt on the bottling line, bull-dogged wine from barrels, cleaned equipment, racked wine off the lees, measured and calibrated tanks, cleaned, saved frogs, combined chemicals, electricity and water, cleaned, crushed, perfected pumpovers (well, almost), learned to drive a fork-lift (and hell yes I am down for a fork-lift rodeo! yee haw!), shoveled rotting fruit, climbed into fermentation tanks and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned…


All in preparation for this day.
This first witness of change, the beautiful berries beginning their transformation into delicious, enticing, mature wine. Wine - a labor of love which begets love. Love unto others, love of the earth, love of this life.

The sugars are going down and alcohol levels are starting to rise….


Oh, and I learned that you can actually SEE carbon dioxide. Shimmering in the air... blurring the distant view like a mirage in the desert. (Then I was told not to stand with my head over the open tank.)