In a winery, all you have to do is taste the wine. Correct, but incomplete! If so, who wouldn’t want to do this as a job? Is it this easy and beautiful all the time? What do you have to do to end up working in such a place?
What do you have to do to work in viticulture?
First of all, you need passion and respect for the grapevine and for the wine. Then, to be able to work in the domain of viticulture, you need practice or an internship. Of course, if you want to do it in a professional way and at a higher level, you will also need a specialization in the field. Without horticultural studies, you can at most to be employed as an unskilled worker in agriculture.
What does internship in viticulture mean? I think that first I have to explain the term, since this is not really practiced in Romania anymore. The internship is a process of guiding a future employee by a specialist mentor (already existing employee in the respective unit). The mentor is the one who teaches the intern what to do in order to correctly fulfill all the tasks of the future position. Internship in the winery field is difficult and rare. This is due to the constant lack of staff and mentors, time for accommodation, learning and understanding the technological processes of production.
Very often, a young employee, specialist (with an engineer’s diploma that attests to this), is faced with a mountain of responsibilities, which he does not know how to face and how to manage. This fact is due to the lack of experience and the lack of a mentor.
Well, in Romania we say that "we steal know how". In other words, we have to turn to mentors from other wineries, who are willing to share their knowledge with us , or we even end up looking outside the country for a mentor willing to help us acquire a minimum of skills in this very beautiful job.
Information certainly does not come overnight, and thus we end up spending the first 2-3 years as interns, for little money and many hours of work, in the hope that at some point, we will also be in the position of mentors. The advantage of these 2-3 years of internship is that it trains you, both physically and mentally, to be able to optimally and disciplined manage all the technological processes required in a vineyard.
Why doesn’t everyone work in a winery?
Arriving in a winery, you realize that you have to show tenacity and discipline constantly. It’s a lot of hard work and very often physical and exhausting, practiced in conditions of humidity and low temperatures (with some exceptions), and for that you need a team with which you can achieve a positive result.
I affirm that the work is done in humid conditions, because for a quality result, impeccable hygiene is needed throughout the processing and the wine maturation. This consists in cleaning, washing, disinfecting with solutions and rinsing with water all tanks, hoses, pumps, vats and other devices and equipment used, which can come into contact with the grapes/must/wine throughout their journey, from the field to the bottle, as a final product.
The work is physically, because most of the equipment is heavy and often requires the collaboration of at least two employees for handling. As for example, the handling of the first processing line, transfer line and bottling line, which often contain pumps, hoses, presses, destemmers, filters and various fittings made out of stainless steel. And if it comes to maturing the wine in oak barrels, they must be maintained, sanitized, moved and cleaned periodically. Not an easy job!
The activity in a winery is complex and difficult. Not everyone can adapt to its rhythm and difficulties. That is why there are very few specialists who can be called mentors in this domain. Many wineries in Romania still call on specialists from outside the country, which they bring with difficulty and for a lot of money (compared to the Romanian economy) during the harvest campaigns, to manage the vine grape processing and winemaking.
The satisfaction and benefits of a good job…
One of the benefits is to take care of the activity of checking and recording the development and evolution of the wine. This consists in the systematic tasting of the wine from all the vessels that keep the Bachus liquor that was worked on so hard to get here. Noting and observing the evolution is a task of great responsibility and a very important step in bringing the wine to the desired quality.
The statement "Correct, but incomplete!" it has its explanation above: there is a lot of work in a winery, but at some point, on this scale of internship and accumulated experiences, you can end up having such a task in the job description! You just have to have the determination, passion and endurance to get there.
Satisfaction appears when consumers start talking about the Wine. Only the product from the winery is praised, although we all know that there is a whole team behind it, people who take care of the vineyard, the winery and the processing of the grapes, the storage and bottling of the wine, the logistics and The One guiding the whole process towards a better result.
Everyone’s satisfaction is the smile and the appreciation you give to those sips of wine and that bottle bought and further recommended for its qualit
