Murder by Winemaking
Hazards
There are hundreds of way to die in a wine cellar.
Accidental deaths are fortunately uncommon, injuries of one sort or another are not, and I have heard of at least one natural death while making wine.
That much does not become clear until after at least one harvest internship.
Will I list them?
Sure, if you’ll listen…
****
Juanita Swedenburg, former owner of eponymous winery in Middleburg now renamed Greenhill Winery, is another larger-than-life figure in the early years of the Virginia wine industry.
Most notably, she was a medical patient of the owner of Doukenie Winery in Hillsboro, a local pulmonologist.
She was Doukenie’s first winemaker, working not in a luxurious winery/tasting facility yet to be built, but in the rudimentary confines of the farmhouse basement, a literal cellar, in the 1980s.
Juanita also allowed a DC journalist and former ABC Radio News Moscow correspondent, Ellen Crosby, to be novelist in-residence at the Swedenburg estate where Crosby began a continuing series of murder mysteries, most recently Deeds Left Undone (2025).
****
A cellar has many moving parts during harvest.
Most winemaking operations require extra hands, short term, so there are often inexperienced workers coming in at a busy, distracting time of year.
The head winemaker has his hands full with pick decisions based on fruit maturity and likely impending weather early, then dozens of near simultaneous fermentations later on.
There may be little time for detailing the nuances of the equipment or chemicals to temporary staff.
The long hours involved, at times up to sixty hours a week, and cumulative fatigue may lead novice workers toward less caution while working under duress.
There was one intern inside a fermentation tank on a ladder that slipped, causing the intern, alone in the cellar, to fall on the upturned ladder and break ribs. Because there was no one to assist, he had to drive himself to the local emergency room.
Another involved a novice intern watching a massive rotary wine press, to lean in too far while watching grape juice flow from the revolving drum. The sliding doors to the drum run on a rail a few inches from the drum surface.
In this unfortunate incident, the rail caught him behind the head, and pulled him into the drip pan, breaking three of his four limbs.
It took others on duty, a while to locate his feeble calls for help: the drip pan is not an obvious location for an injured worker.
Finally, a PTO shaft spins about 500 revs per minute and transmits rotary force from the back end of a tractor crank shaft to accessory units like a post hole digger, or a bush-hog mower.
It is therefore dangerous for a worker to wear loose clothing, scarves or ties in the vicinity of a spinning uncovered PTO shaft. While not strictly a cellar fatality, such accidents have brought farm to grief if the hazard is not appreciated.
Most often, modern wineries use potassium metabisulfite (KMBS) to curb oxidation and microbial growth in ageing wine. As a dry powder, it is relatively easy to handle until dissolved in water.
An aqueous solution does emit SO2 gas which, in the moist trachea and lungs, forms sulfuric acid.
Prior to KMBS powder or tablets, compressed SO2 gas was stored in small steel cylinders. The wine could be gassed by opening the regulator valve. Accidentally opening the value or leaking values in a closed space can be lethal.
*****
Then (told you I had some chemistry), there is the potentially explosive manufacture of champagne, which is illegal to market as such due to European trademark restrictions, in America.
Champagne bottles are made of heavy glass for a good reason.
This type of wine is made by in-bottle fermentation. Atmospheric pressure, on average, is about fourteen pounds per square inch (psi). Most automobile tires are kept inflated to 33-53 psi, two to three times atmospheric.
Tbe pressure that accumulates inside a bottle of champagne is about sixty pounds per square inch, roughly five times atmospheric or two times normal tire pressures.
To make it more interesting, crown-capped bottles, before the cork and cage are set, may be stored in a four foot cube of steel mesh called a gabion. Bottles are layered in the cage six or seven bottles deep, twelve across.
Loading a gabion with champagne bottles requires care, dexterity, caution and discernment.
It is not obvious to the novice what may happen if such a constellation of pressure bombs starts to go bad, most often from the worker dropping a bottle that breaks, through clumsiness, inattention or want of focus.
The first time a bottle explodes is a shock. If the worker is fortunate, only one bottle is lost. However, the cascading shards of heavy glass may uncap other bottles in the cluster, setting off a chain reaction.
Fortunately, the only such event I have heard, involved a few gabions of champagne in a large cellar which had lost power, and hence air-conditioning, during the worst of the summer heat.
When pressurized, capped bottle warm too much, the result can spiral out of control leading to shards of heavy glass imbedded in wooden trim and framing timbers supporting the cellar. In this case, the explosion occurred at night and none of the amazed staff arriving the next morning, were hurt.
OK, one more.
Fermentation generates carbon dioxide.
Human require oxygen to survive and breathe out carbon dioxide. In a wonderful exchange, during peak summer daylight hours, plants such as grape vines gratefully absorb carbon dioxide.
If a wine cellar has twenty or more half-ton vats of red grapes fermenting in late September, and the cellar ventilation fails or doors remain closed, the environment around fermentation tanks can be lethal.
It is a novice move, when passing an open topped vat, to lean in close enough to smell the enticing aromas. More than one intern has taken a header into such a vat.
I know from personal experience.
Likewise, a cell phone in the breast pocket, if the owner doesn’t tumble in, may go missing in the inky black depths of the tannat or petit verdot.
I could go on…
If you fancy a harvest intern job, review these items before going.
The life you save may be your own.
****