Crush!

Saturday we crushed 375 cases of grape - cabernet sauvignon, merlot, pinot noir, San Giovese, syrah - to make 27 barrels of juice and must. A big party! Brothers Mike and Marty, their parents Marie and Ott, Fairy Sue, Jay and Susan and little Cory, Kevin and Martha, and James the blue barrel supplier and his new, very tiny blonde girlfriend, Anton the elder, Mike and Katrina and us - Paolo, Cynthia, and our kids.

Our first surprise came when Marty picked up a bunch of blue-black San Giovese and found a black spider with a red hourglass belly clinging to the underside of the stalk. The black widow, chilled but alive from its refrigerated journey, went into a little salsa jar. Later we found another spider on the outside of a box and popped that in too. Jay said he saw two more on empty wine crates he'd loaded into the truck for his homeless friends to burn.

And as Sue and Susan and I sat inside with cups of tea and leftover lunch we found another black widow crawling up Sue's sleeve. Susan dispatched it with a squish inside a paper towel. As Anton-the-elder changed out of his grapey, tractor-man clothes, he found he'd been cuddling with another one of the arachnids for god-knows-how-long. It kinda freaked him out.

But no-one received injury despite this spiderly plethora as we sorted grapes for hour upon hour (barehanded - rubber gloves are in order next year) and we had a little production line: grapes go into the tractor dumper, which toddles off to the hopper, where pulp, seeds and grape gets sucked into the basement via hose & pump.

Guests began to dwindle at 4pm, but the men still had several pallets of grape and kept it up through a thunderstorm, then hail, then spectacular double rainbows before sunset that called everyone away from their posts to gaze in admiration, rainbows stretching from the southern to northern horizons.

We finished cleanup by 10pm and fell asleep soon after, exhausted by the day and by the preparations for it, holding the energy and vision for all who come to our house to participate in a joyful event.

Our wine will be full of the chattering of friends, of our silly jokes as we sorted grape, and of our dreams for what the success of this venture will bring.