Wine Via Blood, Sweat & Tears

"Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made." -Ted Shawn, Time, 25 July 1955

Gary and I owned a small winery in New Zealand which was actually an old converted sheep shed. It was built of cinder blocks and covered by a tin roof. It was difficult to get all the equipment we needed to make the kind of wine we wanted to make, and we ended up shipping some items from Oregon. In the mean time, the show had to go on. We used this “portable” de-stemmer to remove the grapes from their stems for the fermenting process. The ceiling was very low and we were unable to use anything automated to load the grapes into the hopper where they would then be de-stemmed. So, we had to the carry the harvested grapes up a ladder in small bins and dump them by hand. As the equipment didn’t fit very well on the round oak curves, we had to use heavy plastic to guide the finished product into its intended location. Every day we rigged this contraption to make it work. One year we processed over 60 tonnes of grapes this way. It was exhilarating. The process was so rustic and base that it made you feel like you really had your blood, sweat and tears dripping into each cuve as you coaxed it into its highest form.

Christine Andrus