Next Monday I am in Sonoma, California attending the DCS conference to talk to flooring retailers and professionals about how consumers really search the Internet to find their flooring needs. Since Sonoma is known for its wine I decided to try my hand at making some. Last week while in Boston, I joined a colleague at his homemade wine making operation. The funny thing is that I am allergic to grapes and therefore don’t drink wine.

While driving down to the house to make wine I tried to envision what it would be like. My first thoughts were of the old I Love Lucy episode where she was in a large wooden tub crushing grapes with her feet. The actuality of it all is that wine making is a lot of hard work that takes several weeks to make before it needs to sit for at least 1 to 2 years for taste. Now I know why I haven’t made wine before. There is no way I am patient enough to work really hard for a couple of weeks and then have to wait 1 to 2 years to see the results.

When I arrived at the wine making operation, the grapes had already been crushed and had been sitting in huge covered tubs fermenting for the past 12 days. I was told that the day’s task was pressing the grape skins to extract the rest of the liquid. For 6 hours we pressed skins and transferred the filtered liquid into large glass containers called demijohns. The hardest part of the day was actually cleaning and sterilizing everything for next wine making season. The weather was in the 30’s and we were right on the water in Boston, which made it even colder. Washing out containers in the dark, in the wintery cold for a couple of hours reminded me of what "real" work is really like.

Even though we didn’t go through the entire process of wine making in a day, it was educational on the amount of time and effort that has to go into a good glass of wine. Of course wineries are more automated, but never the less, making wine is a substantial effort and if I drank it, I would have a much deeper appreciation for every sip.