We raced on foot uphill through rows of grapevines that combed the hillside, up toward a mansion looking out across the valley cast in bright morning sun.
By the time Zane and I got there, we were two hours late and breathless. The workers had been clipping bunches of Pinot Noir since 7 a.m., and it was already passing 9.
But when we met the overseer, a burly man who smiled when he spoke, he wasn’t upset with us. He knew last Saturday would be our only day picking wine grapes at the Belle Pente winery about 20 miles southwest of Portland, because we were not pickers.
Zane, a photographer, and I were students who came to find out how wine is made.
The production of wine is a growing industry in Oregon, but particularly in the Willamette Valley. As of last year, there were 303 wineries in Oregon, according the Oregon Wine Center. About 200 of them lie within the same valley that Eugene calls
home, according to wine study group Appellation America.
Back on the hillside, we walked the grass lane that broke the rows. The overseer, whose job is a rough parallel of the shift manager at a McDonald’s, explained to us how to pick.
Normally, job training takes anywhere from a week to years of study, but our training lasted about 30 seconds. He gave us two buckets – the kind that usually sport pictures warning about children falling in – and told us to walk the rows with gardening shears, clipping bunches and dropping them in until the buckets were full.
“If they are not ripe,” he said, gesturing to grapes that were red instead of blue-black, “you leave them.”
Once the buckets were full, we carried them to large plastic bins measuring roughly 4 feet by 4 feet that the overseer brought on his forklift until the people down the hill decided that there were enough grapes picked.
The Workers
At first, the clippers were awkward, and maneuvering them around the leaves took time. By the time I had barely filled half a bucket, one of the other workers walked by with his two full ones in hand.
He smiled and said “hello” in a thick Mexican accent. His name was Felix, and when he brought back his emptied buckets, he returned to clipping quickly and steadily, working his way down the rows.
He chatted with the others through the vines as he worked. Felix was one of six workers – four men, two women. All were Latino, and Felix appeared to speak the best English, although a few of the others may have been more reticent to speak with us because we were such obvious outsiders. One, a broad-chested man in a silver shirt, carried a radio tuned to the Mexican music station, filling the gaps in conversation with horns and drums.
After a couple hours passed, Zane dropped his clippers and picked up his camera, and Felix began teaching me phrases in Spanish. When I asked him how to say different things, he would stop clipping momentarily and answer truthfully, smiling in amusement. But he was a patient teacher, and I learned how to ask names, how to say a few nouns and, most importantly, to ask whether a person enjoyed this job.
Through the leaves, I spotted a woman who appeared to be in her late forties, whom Felix called Maria. I asked her name and how she was feeling that day. She responded in Spanish – in part to humor me and in part because she spoke no English. When I asked her if she liked picking, she said something that Felix translated into, “No, because the pay is bad and she likes her other job better.”
Felix said her other job was making airplane parts.
I imagined her displeasure had something to do with the job’s toughness on the back and knees.
The day passed, and we all picked bucket after bucket of grapes and dumped them into the bins that literally writhed with yellow jackets.
I often stopped and took a moment to savor a single grape. They were sweeter than any grapes I’d ever had, but the husks were rough and the flesh contained two seeds that needed to be spit out. Felix took a few bites as well.
Clipping close together in a row, we got to talking about our hometowns. He said he was born in a small town near Mexico City that he sounded out as “Juan-na-puer-ta,” and grew up with parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, six brothers and four sisters. In 1995, when he was 22, he left to try and make his fortune in El Norte. He said this with long pauses filled only with the rhythm of his clippers.
He eventually found his way to McMinnville, Ore., and by 2001 had earned enough to bring up his family “except one sister and an uncle,” he said.
Before, he worked at a plant nursery, but they wouldn’t let him work six days a week. So he left for the harvest, a job he’d gotten though his brother-in-law, the radio-carrying worker in the silver shirt.
At 2 p.m., it was decided that there were enough grapes for the day, so Zane and I said our goodbyes and graciases and ventured down the hill to meet the winemakers. While walking downhill, it struck me that the people I’d spent the last five hours with had probably never tasted a chilled glass of Belle Pente wine.
The Winemakers
The winemakers were finishing lunch when we arrived. Empty wineglasses rested on the picnic table, and one was finishing the last bit of what looked to be focaccia bread baked with cheese and sliced tomatoes. The five winemakers were all white and included among their ranks three interns working only for the harvest, the owner and his full-time assistant.
We sat and talked with one intern, Vincent, who looked to be in his late-twenties. After getting his bachelor’s degree in English, he spent a year in Chicago while some friends were in graduate school at Northwestern. He’d been playing music with a friend at bars in the city – “singer-songwriter sort of stuff.”
An intern told us to walk down into where the grapes were processed to wash up.
The processing area consisted of two squat buildings broken by a roofed, unwalled platform that resembled where the pumps sit at gas stations. The area was filled with bizarre machines that looked as though they’d been designed as part of a collaborative effort between Rube Goldberg and Dr. Seuss.
There was a press that looked like an iron lung, gigantic vats and a system of conveyer belts snaking up into a metallic box eight feet high with two output chutes. One dripped grape mush, and the other aimed at a bin overflowing with stems.
We entered the fermentation building, which was large and empty except for loops of copper tubing on the walls, a small bathroom and a counter covered in beakers and glass bends with two sinks from which we drank and washed the sweat from our faces. Walking out, I saw the pickers piling into a beige minivan, ready to drive the gravel road out from the winery back toward McMinnville.
After setting up the press for white wine, the owner set the bins on the conveyer belt where a hydraulic lift poured the grapes onto a conveyer belt so the winemakers could examine them for quality and pick out leaves, stems, earwigs, yellow jackets and other nasty bits not blown out during the forklift ride down the hill that would adversely affect the wine’s flavor.
Vincent, the musician, said he’d worked in another winery that every day would remove “10,000 ladybugs and 100,000 earwigs from each batch with a suction machine called a ‘bug-sucker.’”
After inspection, during which everyone agreed that this year’s crop was phenomenal, the grapes then rode up another conveyer belt, where they entered a machine that stripped them from the bunch and dropped them into a tall container. Dry ice was added to keep them cool before the grapes were put into a silver fermenting tank and allowed to sit for a few weeks.
The resulting slurry was to be strained and placed in barrels, where it would rest for two years while “the magic happened,” said Michael.
Standing and sorting the grapes, Michael said the area, and the Willamette Valley in general, is perfect for wine growing. The duration of the grow
ing season is just right. The summers are dry, so the vines don’t get diseases from moisture. The soil quality is poor, which is, consequently, the exact kind of soil grape vines need to thrive.
He gestured to another building and said it housed the on-premise bottling plant.
In 2001, Michael graduated from the University with a degree in journalism, but said he couldn’t find a job. One year, on a whim, he worked a harvest and found he loved it.
“It’s better than wearing a tie,” he said, with a conspiratorial smirk.
As they sorted through bin after bin of grapes Zane and I had helped pick, the winemakers joked with one another, working but having a great time with a linfectious sort of fun. I couldn’t help but like these guys. They were funny and friendly. They were relaxed, being true to themselves and working a job they loved.
Nicholas flicked out a yellow jacket, and adopted a fake George W. Bush voice and said, “We will root them out in their houses, we will root them out in their villages.”
“We will stop the yellow jackets,” he said. “We have a coalition of the willing.”
Nicholas later told me he never went to college, but instead found the job at the winery. He said the job helped him feel in-tune with the seasons because he works outdoors, and that it’s a perfect blend of “chemistry, high culture, manual labor and art.”
“It’s a little more real,” he said.
I finally spoke with Brian O’Donnell, the man who owned the winery and lived in the mansion at the top of the hill. Bespectacled and sporting a bedraggled beard that made him look like a professor, he sat behind the wheel of the overseer’s forklift loading bins of grapes onto a set of rollers.
When the last of the bins was loaded, O’Donnell stepped down and began inspecting the grapes with the interns. He said after the wine is bottled, it is trucked to a distributors warehouse, then to 15 states on the East and West coasts and Chicago.
O’Donnell grew up in New York. In the late 1980s, while working in marketing for Xerox and Intel corporations, he started making wine as a hobby. His hobby got out of control, and in 1992 he bought the vineyard property.
He said he had lived with his wife and only daughter in a mobile home on the hill until two years ago, when the business became so successful that he was able to build a beautiful home for his family.
Satisfied we’d gotten our story, Zane and I said our goodbyes to the winemakers. We piled into Zane’s car and drove the gravel road back past the tractors, barns and farmland. As we reached the interstate to head back to Eugene, I began to fall asleep. Before I did, I remember thinking the wine-making process I’d just witnessed was millennia-old but at the same time modern and American.
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