TARZAN OF THE grAPES!

Today I did something that most people would wish for if they rubbed a lamp and a genie popped out. I saw into the future.

Or, more specifically, into the "futures". In winespeak, futures are wine orders which are placed at least a year in advance of the actual harvest. At my vineyard, they hold a yearly dinner for the people who are on the emailing list. At this dinner, folks are wined and dined - they enjoy wines from the vineyard and eat delectable victuals prepared by the chef/owner. At this shindig, the invitees fill out order forms (and pay up front, I might add) for wines whose grapes have not yet been harvested.



Once the grapes have been harvested, and the wine has been made, these notebooks full of futures orders must be gone through. All the futures clients must be called personally to let them know that their futures are ready to be picked up or shipped. If they are picking them up personally, we ask that they call us an hour ahead of time so that we can box up the wines they have ordered and have them ready when they arrive.

Mind you, these wines may not actually be ready to drink at this time. The owners of the vineyard send out special emails to let people know when the 2007 merlot, for example, is ready for drinking. Some of the wines that have been bottled will not be ready for premium drinking enjoyment for another several months. But people have already paid for this wine, and we would much rather they pick it up and take it home and let it mature there, so we have more room in our storehouses - harvest is just about to begin!



If the customers ordering futures chose to have them shipped rather than picking them up in person, then we get to what I spent the day doing!

There is a large, climate-controlled building on the property which houses all the cased wines. They are arranged by type and year, and are stacked on huge pallets that rise up to the ceiling. Each pallet of wine is wrapped in super-thick saran-wrap type material, and topped with a cardboard cover. In order to "pull futures", someone has to go inside the warehouse and get down cases of wine in the appropriate year's vintage for the customer.



Never having done "futures" before, I was unaware of exactly what this would entail when the boss gave me a task list which said "ship futures". She did say that "over the next two weeks" we would be boxing up the futures orders to be shipped out.

Yesterday, the first thing I did was to go through the two alphabetized notebooks of futures orders and cull out the ones that the clients had marked "ship". Then I spent the entire day making phone calls to the "shippers" and the "picker-uppers" to let them know that the futures wines were ready to be picked up or about to be shipped.



Today, I took the stack of "shippers" and wrote down a list of how many bottles/cases of each type of wine were being ordered. On a separate piece of paper, I wrote down how many shipping boxes I needed (case boxes, six-fer boxes, two-fer boxes, and the inner cardboard wraparounds which go inside every shipping box). Then I took my lists, and a two-wheeled hand truck, and headed over to the case storage warehouse.

Once at the warehouse, I selected all the boxes I would need, and carted them back to the fermenting room, which is just off the tasting room. The fermenting room perimeter is lined with huge stainless steel contraptions (will take photos tomorrow, perhaps) but the central cement floor is clear right now, so I used that as my staging area.



Then I went back to the case storage warehouse and began "pulling futures". What this means, really, is that I had to search for each type of wine, then search for boxes which bore the specific year being ordered, and then I had to get the right number of cases of each.

Sounds easy, right? Well, not when you consider that some of the pallets that I had to reach were up near the ceiling, and had not yet been unwrapped from their plastic cocooning. I had to play Tarzan, as it were, and climb up on top of staggered pallets of wine, sometimes reaching across the treacherous chasms between the stacked pallets to get the right cases of wine. Some of the pallets were stacked so closely together that even when I was walking on the floor between them, I had to carry cases of wine over my head because there wasn't enough room for my admittedly voluptuous body and the case of wine to fit between the pallets.



Needless to say, I was a ball of sweat within ten minutes - and the entire pulling process took me over half an hour! I put all the cases of wine (around sixteen or so) up near the loading door, and then used the hand truck to cart them (three at a time) around to the fermenting room.

Without going through every painstaking detail, I will just say that I pulled and boxed up every single futures order to be shipped, double checked them all to make sure the orders were perfect, made shipping labels, and charged the customers' credit cards for shipping.... TODAY.

Considering that the boss said that we'd be shipping futures "over the next two weeks", I don't think they've ever seen what TARZAN OF THE grAPES could do with futures once she was set loose on the project.

I can assure you that TARZAN OF THE grAPES never realized she had this many muscles in her body before, and the only reason she knows about them now is because they are SORE.



The truly classic moment, however, came at around 3:00PM, when the boss walked in to the fermenting room and surveyed the neatly arrayed rows of perfectly packed futures boxes, and said...

"Well, this was a pretty easy futures shipment, eh?"

My face tried and couldn't find a suitable expression, and so remained blank.