In this submission to our 2024 wine writing competition, Emily Grazier writes about the moment that led her to pursue a career as a winemaker. For more great wine writing, see our competition guide.
Emily Grazier writes I’m currently the assistant winemaker at Hosmer Winery, a family-owned, estate winery on Cayuga Lake. Besides multiple wineries in the Finger Lakes region, I have also worked in California and New Zealand. Prior to the pandemic, I traveled around the world dancing Argentine Tango. I have a background in philosophy and literature, focusing on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and have studied Ancient Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and am currently pursuing German. I work as a freelance writer in my spare time
Of Mice and Grapes
The wine moment I’ll never forget starts with a fermenting bin of red grapes. I no longer remember the varietal, but this was Keuka Lake so they were probably Cabernet Franc. The assistant winemaker glanced inside, exclaimed, “oh!” and then reached in, pulling out a mouse by the tail. It was dead. Its fur was purpled and matted like rain-soaked velvet, and we all peered at it in horror for a moment before she walked over to the trash can.
It was not a glamorous or a particularly inspiring moment on the surface. It was a moment that is all practical action but fizzes with the potential for symbolism. But that’s what wine production is like, in its essence, and it’s the most vivid moment of that harvest, and maybe the most vivid moment of any harvest I’ve worked. It was when I knew that I loved this industry.
It was when I decided I wanted to be a winemaker.
First of all, I wanted to be someone cool like Gwen (name changed), who could buzz her hair during harvest because it was too sticky from grape juice to comb and who could pick up a dead mouse with her bare hands completely unflustered. But mostly I wanted to know how and why things happened, where wine came from in a fully practical, technical, and logistical sense. And I wanted to know about transformation, because in general, in our day-to-day interactions we mostly interact with completed things – things that have experienced all the becoming they’re going to do and are now waiting out obsolescence.
It did not start out this way. Before I worked this first harvest, I spent most of my time writing essays on poetry and translating works from Latin, Ancient Greek, and French – many of which often featured wine. Cue something dramatic about wine being the life-nourishing child of the vine. The practical world felt very far away, and everything felt very polished and analytical. I saved my measly dollars from campus jobs and bought bottles of Port and Riesling and felt very elegant and Bohemian at the same time. I also read about wine. I loved the precision of it, how articles and reference books pointed out that winemakers pick the grapes at just the right time for the perfect ripeness, to make the best wine possible. Because I had read a lot of poetry I thought this sounded beautiful and poetic and I believed it very literally.
And it is true – we do try to pick the grapes at exactly the peak moment of ripeness. But what I couldn’t have known – what no one can really know until you do it, is how many moving parts there are. That you will be forced to balance a host of competing demands – the logistics of your picking team, of the harvester, of your tank capacity, of the weather, of disease pressure, of bird pressure. That one minute you will hold aloft the most beautiful, perfect cluster of grapes you’ve ever seen and fall in love with this industry all over again, and the next minute you will be fishing around in a mass of cold, slimy crushed grapes for the sharp metal vineyard staple that made it past the sorting process and could absolutely cripple your wine press.
There is very little that is glamorous or elegant about the act of making wine. It is beautiful, absolutely, but the glamor and elegance come much later, after the grapes have gone from individual clusters to a liquid mass back to an individual unit in the form of a wine bottle. Elegance requires distance and remove. It relies on discrete units, and it certainly does not require dead mice. I love drinking the perfectly chosen bottle in elegant settings, with all the prestige and glamor that that implies. But I’ve never felt myself to be more alive than in doing the inelegant tasks of the harvest season.
The photo, of vines at the end of harvest, Hosmer Winery, 2023, is the author's own.