I’ve been a cellar rat at Red Knuckle Wines for one month. Brought on for the harvest. But it’s not my first month. I’ve done this every year for the past five years. I started with my roommate, Kirby, but we only worked that first summer together. He was killed in a motorcycle accident on the 217 with his girlfriend. Some assembly-line blonde named Jackie. Or so I was told.
Harvest happens every summer, during August and September when five to seven tons of fruit – fruit is what they call grapes in the wine biz – are picked and processed daily. Once the fruit is picked, it can’t wait until the next day. It has to be pressed and processed that day.
The white grapes go into a massive steel cylinder about fifteen feet long and big enough for me, at five-foot-ten to hunch in. Inside the tank is a bladder that fills with compressed air. As the bladder fills, it squeezes the juice and life out of anything in there. The juice drips into a dustpan-shaped siphon and is pumped into steel cauldrons. All the skins, leaves, stems, twigs, and whatever bugs were stowing away on the fruit, hitching a ride, are left behind in the tank to be hosed out by me. That’s the white wine.
Red wine is a little different. A forklift hoists half a ton of fruit at a time onto a conveyor belt. I stand along the side with the other cellar rats, plucking out leaves and twigs. Think Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory. As the fruit is inspected, it falls into a steel tank, eight feet across by four feet deep – skins, stems, and all. That’s how red wine gets its color. From the skins.
Making wine takes time. It can’t be hurried through. I work the night shift. I work alone. Just me and a Slate Podcast in the AirPods. That was the case until two nights ago anyway.
As red wine ferments in open-top steel tanks, the fruit needs to be stirred on a strict schedule to make sure the yeast and various nutrients the winemaker adds are mixed evenly. The problem is, that fermenting wine produces massive quantities of carbon dioxide and the C02 creates so much pressure, you can practically walk across the top.
I use a hand-held hydraulic press that plunges a metal frisbee-like disk into the hopper to aerate the fruit. The thing’s pretty janky. The winery can do better if you ask me.
But there I was. Standing on the ladder. Regretting various life decisions. Struggling to plunge the frisbee across every inch of surface area. Pushing fruit down. Pulling fruit up. Rinse and repeat.
When I saw a stick, dyed red from the grapes, poking out of the fruit. Must’ve been missed during the sorting. It was close enough to the edge I could reach it if I moved the ladder.
Ladder in place, I leaned over the edge of the tank and grabbed the stick. Pulled and met resistance. It wasn’t a stick. It was a finger.
Attached to a hand.
As dead fingers grazed mine, I screamed and slipped off the ladder. Landing on the concrete floor. Hard.
Breathing fast. Panicked. I had to see what it was.
I climbed back up the ladder, hoping the hand wouldn’t be there. Hoping it had sunk to the bottom. But the C02. The pressure. The hand couldn’t sink. It was there. Like a crosswalk sign, waving me not to cross. But I had to. Something compelled me.
I reached in. Grabbed the hand.
And pulled out an arm. But I met resistance.
It wasn’t just an arm. There was more in here. More to pull out. I needed both hands. Fingers slipping and sliding on bits of grape pulp and sticky juice, fighting for grip. I braced my foot against the edge of the tank. And heaved.
And then, like a whale surfacing for air, the dead man’s body breached the grapes. There he was. Staring up at me. Looking the same as he did five years ago. Kirby.