Mahvelous Maine

Jaime's Moody Mountain, Maine, hideway, complete with woodburning fireplace and fabulous view

                            And here is the view.... on a beautiful, sunny day...

                                           a beautiful cloudy day
                                                    

           
                                          The pond visible from her deck........

                                            Welcome to New Hampshire!

                                                   OK, so it's arty..........

                                          Can't resist reflection...........

                                           And from the other direction.......

                            Sixties chicks in Jaime's Miata...Woowee!!!

 These shelters are ubiquitous in Maine, this one covering Jaime's winter vehicle....

                             Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
                                                

                         That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, 

                                   And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
                                           

                                                         Beautiful.........

                                        Farewell, Moody Mountain

Caesar Chavez Is My New Hero

                                           My battle scars from picking grapes.

Before I even moved to Arizona in the early 1970s,  labor organizer Caesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers organized boycotts, including of grapes, in support of farmworkers, primarily in the California valleys.  He and his organization worked to ban the short-handled hoe, an implement requiring workers to bend and stoop all day long.  It was a bitter fight which went up to the California Supreme Court before agricultural interests bowed to worker safety.

Here in Wise County, we've had too much rain for the grapes and some are starting to rot

so Suzanne and David have been frantically picking, along with kinfolk, volunteers and a few college students who seem to appear when they need money.

 Josh goes to UVA Wise and is quite pleasant to work with, though AARP eligible as I am, I can outpick him.

Of course, his body won't ache like mine will.  

Picking grapes isn't rocket science but it's tedious, hard, back-breaking labor.  I can manage two or three hours and then I'm achy all over, requiring aspirin and a long soak in the tub.  Gloves hinder my productivity, but I seem to be a klutz and draw blood.  Suzanne and David don't have the luxury of quitting the row, taking their clippers, and going home.  Pick or perish.

Row after row of grapes in three vineyards in two counties.

Doesn't have that manicured appearance that we see in the publicity photos of California vineyards....or even those we have on our own website.  It's harvest time.  All energy goes into picking, not making it look pretty.  And, larger vineyards, especially those in agricultural areas such as Napa, draw upon those evil illegal alien migrants as their picking labor.  Lots of food wouldn't get to our tables without those migrants.   

About 10 acres altogether.  Doesn't sound like much, but many suburban houses sit on about one-fifth of an acre...and the house takes up a good bit of that one-fifth. 

The basics are straightforward.

Great technique, Judy!

Notice my picking outfit...stylish. 

 Five gallon buckets.....

 Go into the white bin, which then goes by tractor to the winery, where grapes are pressed into juice.

The bunches of grapes in the local supermarket are so innocent looking, as if they'd practically fall off the vine, if you asked nicely.  But on the vine, in the vineyard, they can be obdurate.

 Tendrils twine around, grasping another twig, forcing me to work my hand up and around.  Multiple bunches meld one into another, so when I cut one one bunch, it hangs on for dear life to the other. 

Not easy picking....  Thank you Caesar Chavez for organizing farmworkers and making their lives less miserable.

Thomas Stearns Was Wrong

April is the cruellest month, breeding 

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 

Memory and desire, stirring 

Dull roots with spring rain. 

Winter kept us warm, covering         

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding 

A little life with dried tubers.

Thomas Stearns was wrong.  April isn’t the cruelest month; that disgrace goes to October, to the aptly named fall.

April’s gusts blow away the remnants of the gloom that lay over the earth, taking me by the hand, and dancing me into the warmth and color and vibrancy of the longer days of May.  April is rebirth, gentle green sprigs, joy at once again coming forth from the darkness to the vitality of the new day.

October days noticeably shorten, nudging me further under the blankets, its gusts breaking the leaves from their twigs leaving the world bare.  October deceives, with each day shorter and colder than the day before, but still with the warmth of the midday sun.  October is the inevitable diminishment into the fortress of winter in which all loss is encapsulated.

My friend Matilda would disagree with me.  She loves the brief grayness of winter days, days when she can curl up in a snug blanket on the sofa, the flames of the fireplace dancing warmly before her, her hands around a warm cup of tea, a good book open on her lap.  Winter keeps her warm.

Winter chills me to the core of my being, and the falling leaves of October are its harbinger. 

Bottling

Mountain Rose will never be a threat to Gallo, or even Chateau Morrisette up in Floyd County.  It's a small, family winery, and that's what it always wants to be.  Bottling is small-scale, but very, very labor intensive.  Three machines in the MRV bottling room take a person each to operate, plus steps before, after, and in-between each with its own person attached.  David says that even if MRV had a fully-automated bottling process, the process itself requires folks at every step of the way. We're neither a GM factory nor the Lucy episode in the candy factory.  Here's what happens.

Boxes with bottles come into the winery.  Joe (formerly of Albuquerque and before that Utah) here is turning the box upside down to empty the bottles onto the table where the next person

injects inert gas into each one, the purpose of which is to get air out of the bottle.  This little machine takes two at a time after which he hands them off to

 the "cow" which has six teats (my name and my description 'cuz I don't know what it's really called) and is the most automated part of the process.  Volunteer Seta (who summers in Wise with her husband who's from this area, but lives in the Virginia Beach area) attaches each bottle to a teat and wine flows into each bottle with a sensor stopping the flow when an individual bottle is full.   As she pulls off each bottle, she hands it off to

the capper (who lives down in Tennessee which is just a short jaunt away), who puts a cap on the top of each bottle, and then hands the bottle over to the person running the machine that actually screws the cap onto the bottle. 

Here kinfolk Doug opens the door, inserts the bottle, closes the door,

pushes the button....  Voila!

 The potential "Lucy in the candy factory" moment could occur here, but somehow we manage to keep a smooth pace.  MRV does not use cork, either real cork or plastic cork.  Purists, of course, may be appalled, but even 20 years ago, my cousin who was VP for bottling at a very well-know Napa Valley winery told me that screw caps were as good as cork.  And they do not require rooting around for  a cork screw or trying to figure out how to open a bottle when the cork screw has disappeared! 

The capped bottle is wiped with a cloth by kinfolk Clint and then goes back into

a box which has been carried around the back way from its dumping at the beginning of the line, the bottle handled by Rosita (who's from the Navajo Reservation out by Grants, NM), wife of Joe.  

 I avoid the machine jobs.  Sticking bottles in boxes is about my skill level!!

Small family wineries wouldn't survive without volunteers.  All these folks are volunteers, including those of us who are kinfolk.  Suzanne provides a good lunch for all, kinfolk Doug makes bad jokes, and we keep on bottlin'.