Would you like some cheese with that whine?

As with every job - even a "dream job" - there comes a time when the harsh realities set in and you realize that everything isn't wine and roses all the time. As I am journaling my experiences at the vineyard, I am not going to pamper you, Dear Readers, by only including the happy little butterflies and fluffy bunnies. If I get beat up, you're going to get a few bruises too.

This past weekend was one of the toughest yet (another wedding) - but yesterday really took the cake. My schedule said to come in at 8AM, because we were serving a wedding brunch before the happy couple and their assorted family sailed off into the sunset. I was up at 6AM getting ready for the hour-long drive in.

I got there exactly ten minutes early, put my purse in the tasting room loft, and headed over to the main house to help set up the brunch. They immediately had me carting furniture around from building to building, so that by 8:25AM I was a dripping mass of sweat. I still had to serve food and beverages at the brunch and then work the tasting room until closing time afterwards, and I felt like a work horse that had been lathered up in its traces before the first field had been plowed.

Working brunches could be a very pleasant and easy affair, but for some reason here they are turned into somewhat of a boxing match. Because the owners choose to let the staff work independently instead of giving us our own areas to handle, it's a bit like jousting in front of the King.



Daniel stands at the cooking island in the kitchen, which is right next to the tables we're serving, and he watches our every move. As I walk toward the buffet table to remove an empty frittata platter, Susan darts in from the other side and grabs the platter, bringing it back to Daniel for a refill. Score: Susan 1, Vina 0. As I move to the coffee table to check on the level of the coffee, I see Brenda run to the kitchen and come out with a pot of coffee. Foiled again. When I have a tray full of dirty dishes that I have collected from the tables and am bringing them back to the tiny 3"X3" washing station at the back of the house, the housekeeper steps in front of me and opens the big stainless steel refrigerator door (which completely blocks access to the washing station) and stands there, deciding which milk container she would really rather select.



Instead of the crew working together to get what should be an extremely easy job done efficiently, everyone is scuttling around trying to look the best in front of the boss. When I am faced with situations like this, I tend to retract - if someone else wants to do the thing I was obviously heading over there to do, then I let them. But that results in my standing still, looking as if I don't want to work. Which, of course, is neither true nor desirable considering I've just been made a salaried employee. So what ends up happening is that I walk around the floor, moving from station to station, trying to get something useful done before anyone else cuts me off at the pass. It's a bit off-putting, to tell you the truth.

If the coffee station, the buffet table, and the dining tables were each assigned to one employee, it would all go off perfectly. With a business this small in scale, there is no reason for the staff to go running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Especially considering the fact that there were fifty guests also milling about the room, going between the dining tables and the buffet tables. Utter chaos.

And then there's the issue of the food. Daniel makes delectable, scrumptious food for the brunch, and then spends the next two hours muttering resentfully under his breath that people actually want to eat it. (The nerve of them!) He gets highly offended when the bacon platter is emptied, and flat out refuses to refill it until he deems the precise moment has come, no matter how many brunch attendees have not even had one piece yet. Sometimes I wonder if he thinks the bacon would be better served in small glass picture frames, so that everyone could take one piece home with them and hang it on the wall. If making home-cured maple bacon is so expensive that it causes a financial overload and emotional trauma to actually serve it to your guests, then perhaps, in the end, everyone would be happier with Jimmy Dean sausages. I'm just saying.



At noon, the buffet was over and it was time to break down the tables and get all the rented chinaware back into its green wire cages and get over to the tasting room to begin a six-hour stint.

I love working the tasting room - don't get me wrong. My gripe here is this. I didn't get a lunch break. Not any kind of a break, actually. I worked on my feet from 8AM to 6:30PM without so much as a sit-down. For some reason this is considered normal and acceptable by the owners, and I'm here to tell you that, along with the rest of me, my feet are screaming mad!

When I got home, I hobbled to the couch and my husband brought me a bucket of ice water to put my feet in. Thank goodness this was the last vineyard wedding of the year!