It's taken me a few more weeks than I had hoped to get these photos up from my recent volunteer day with Serpent Ridge Winery in Westminster, Md. Life intervenes.
For more than a year now, I've been watching the winery's calls for volunteers to help crush, press, pick, or bottle, hoping to match up a day when I was free and they needed help. Invariably things didn't work out. Turns out, a lot of people like to volunteer at the winery and you only need so much help at a time. But finally, in mid-November I got my chance.
My friend, Maureen, and I joined six other volunteers for a morning of crushing cabernet sauvignon grapes that the winery had just received from another farm in Maryland. After a morning of lifting, pouring, and cleaning, we were rewarded with a wonderful lunch and a discount on our wine purchase. It's a great experience to be involved in, and hopefully we'll get the chance to do other parts of the process next year.
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| Maureen weighs a box of grapes - they ranged from 14-30+ lbs |
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| This is what the grapes look like before crushing... |
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| The crusher before it's in place... |
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| And after crushing.... |
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| Create a work line to pass along the grapes |
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| They try to quickly pull junk out of the grapes before they get crushed |
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| And, the bins get cleaned after their grapes are dumped... |
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| This is the winery cat, Zork, named after the wine cap |
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