The Vanishing Harvest Intern

Fables, Myths and Cautionary Tales

The accident on Thursday of the second week played out the day before he rescued the cat.

Every winemaker had stories if he stuck with it long enough and Horton’s had its own mythology. The one where an intern had stuck his head too far into the revolving press was a classic, and although it was an actual event, the result echoes in the imagination for years after as if it were a parable.

It was late night, the last press watched by a skeleton crew while the others went home and the intern had been inexperienced.

The press, a massive stainless steel cylinder, is charged with five tons of grapes and revolves to tumble the clusters between inflations of a voluminous rubberized canvas bag inside. The bag presses the grapes against the cylinder which is slotted on its inside surface opposite the pressure bag.

The grapes, pressed against the screen, bleed juice out the slots, and the sticky, sweet liquid dribbles down the outside and drips into a large tub below called the drip pan.

At the start of the run, the door of the cylinder is slid open while the tank is paused with the door and its railing on either side of the opening, directly up. When filled, the door is slid shut, often with great effort, the press is cleared of workers and someone goes to the control panel at one end and rotates the control knob to the cycle position.

Slowly, the great tank shudders against the gears and begins its planetary rotation.

From the floor, the cylinder is seen only as its very topmost horizon rotates, elevated by the frame and various burnished steel sheet doors that conceal most of the cylinder in operation.

However, the side doors can be unlatched and swung down to reveal the cylinder and to limited extent, the condition of the drip pan below, echoing with the sounds of hundreds of gallons of flowing, dripping grape juice, one rivulet and one drop at a time.

The tub below must be monitored so it does not overflow with precious juice. At intervals that are as much guess work as anything, a large pump sitting nearby on pneumatic tires, is turned on to aspirate the drain in the drip pan, and direct the juice through a hundred feet of one inch reinforced plastic tubing, to the underbelly of a clean three thousand gallon stainless fermentation tank.

One laboriously loaded, the press cycle takes up to three hours of relative boredom before no more juice can be pressed and the flattened grapes and stems, called pomace, must be removed and discarded before the next press run.

In a twelve hour day, three press runs, a yield of seven hundred to a thousand gallons juice each, can be managed, but not without perfect timing and efficiency.

The intern was charged with keeping the drip pan from overflowing.

With the rotating drum in motion, it is possible to look over the edge of the frame and down beside the rotating drum, to see the drip pan juice level, often frothing with the flowing grape juice.

The stainless steel track, tubes on which the sliding door can be heaved open or shut, impinge on the already narrow space between rotating drum and frame, while the machine alternates in a series of wheezes, exhausts and filling of the massive canvas bag within that usually reaches an atmosphere and a half for a defined period and deflates, in synchrony with the rotation cycles.

The noise imitates a submarine, the echoes of steel and plumbing and running juice, the clank and hum of the electric motors and the sheer scale of the machinery.

The intern made two errors.

First, he leaned too far into the machinery, too close to the rotating cylinder in his effort to keep the juice level low. When not needed, the exterior pump is off to prevent it sucking air into the hose: air contact, if excessive, will oxidize the juice.

He lost cognizance that, unseen while he looked in, the rails of the cylinder door would suddenly appear unnoticed until the last moment.

The rail caught him on the back of the skull and dragged him bodily into the machine, and he lay in the tub sized drip pan, cried out weakly with two broken legs and a broken arm.

The intern survived, but did not return to winemaking.

This was legend of the early days at Horton, perhaps in the mid to late 1990s, although the exact date of the parable was never mentioned in its retelling.