Life, on the Line by Grant Achatz (leveled readers .TXT) 📗

house, too. Joanie likes tulips, so we’ll give her some tulips around there,” he said with a shrug and a smile.

I had toured a few of the big wineries in the valley and they were anything but romantic. Dozens of workers wore hard hats and lifted zip palettes of wine on forklifts while giant fire hoses moved enough wine to fill a small pond. La Jota was the opposite of that—it had character. The stone structure was built in 1867 and was largely unchanged. The surroundings were magical, and Bill seemed to be the gentle grandfather of every kid’s fishing dreams.

Bill showed me around the cellar and grounds and then we settled into his office. “Well, Grant, you sure are quiet. I like that. Do you want a job?”

“I do. Thanks.”

Despite everything Bill had told me, I was expecting to find some technology at the vineyard once I started. At the very least I assumed there’d be automated machines for the pressing, pumping, and bottling of the wine. Once I got there I found that the reality was as far from my expectations as possible—in a good way. Absolutely everything was done by hand.

I spent the first few weeks preparing for the onslaught of the harvest. I cleaned the large stainless-steel fermenters using buckets of bleach and citric acid, climbing inside with a scrub brush attached to a long pole. I spent days organizing the cellar and moving in the new oak barrels.

Bill and I measured the grapes’ Brix—or sugar content—religiously as they hung in the vineyard nearly ready to pick. While we were collecting samples one day Bill mentioned that the fruit at the Sonoma vineyard where he purchased his pinot noir grapes was ready. “Jim says they look good and we should plan to pick tomorrow or the next day.”

“Cool,” I thought, “I finally get to make some wine.”

The following day we drove to the Sonoma coast with our vineyard team and harvested the grapes into three large bins and trucked them back to the winery.

“Bill, why aren’t we unloading these up top by the press?” I asked.

He explained that with the pinot grapes he liked to do things differently. He put them through what’s called “whole berry fermentation.” The fruit is encouraged to begin fermenting inside its own skin, which helps develop flavors like banana, cherry, and even bubble gum. It also helps reduce the malic acid and increase the chances of higher alcohol content—Bill liked strong wines.

It was cold enough that we could cover the grapes for the night and start processing them in the morning.

The next day I walked into the office to find Bill sitting at his desk doing some accounting. He welcomed me as I pulled up a chair to hear what the plan was for the day. Bill paused, looked at me, and a big grin came over his face. “Grant, today you’re going to crush the pinot grapes in the fermenters outside.”

I clapped my hands together, excited to be really making wine and said, “Okay . . . show me what I have to do.”

Bill’s grin widened further as he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a pair of purple swim trunks. He tossed them in my direction. “You’ll need these.” I figured that it would be a messy process and he was trying to spare my jeans from stains.

He led me outside and down the hill to the front of the winery where the fermenters were located. They were three white plastic tubs, each chest-high and six feet square. He glanced at the shorts and told me to put them on as he lifted the lids off the fermenters.

I was starting to figure out what he had in mind but wouldn’t let myself believe that he was going to ask me to take my clothes off and wade around in the warm grape bog. As I was getting undressed he said, “There are a few bees on the surface and the cap will likely hit you about waist high, so, well, you aren’t allergic to bee stings, are you?” He was now laughing out loud in a good-natured way. I glanced into one of the fermenters and shook my head at the swarm of bees gathered on top. Every second a few more would dive-bomb into the vat of sugar. It vanquished my romantic notions of crushing grapes underfoot in the middle of wine country.

“Uh, Bill. Why are we doing this? I mean, don’t they have machines for this kind of thing?”

“They do, but we want to be very, very gentle on the grapes. Your feet are nice and soft.”

I managed to wade carefully through the grape baths without a sting while I gently crushed the grapes. It even became enjoyable. But while hosing down after finishing, I stepped on a bee. Seems I needed one sting to prove I did it.

A few months later, after the wine was well into the barrel and the vineyard was cleaned up for the following spring, Bill asked if I could cook a dinner party for a small group at the new house. “Of course,” I said, happy to show him what I could do in a kitchen.

“Good then. By the way, it’s for Food and Wine magazine. They want to do a profile on our Cab Franc.” Whoa.

Once Food & Wine found out that Bill had hired an ex-French Laundry cook as an assistant winemaker, they decided to turn the article into a dinner-party theme, with me cooking dishes that paired well with the luscious Cab Franc. It was my first press of any kind and a fairly substantial piece.

I thought it was pretty cool that my photo and food were in a major magazine, and when the article came out I got plenty of phone calls from people I hadn’t spoken with in quite some time. One of them was Angela from The French Laundry. She had seen the piece—someone had pinned it to the wall in