The Wine Factory

Three weeks later, we are still in Blenheim, working in the wine-bottling factory.

It is getting colder in the mornings. I wonder whether they can feel it getting warmer back home - if they can feel the sun pulling away from here, as I can feel it ellipsing toward them. Yesterday, I saw a little maple tree turning orange in someone's garden, and it reminded me of home. At this time of year, back home, there would be school kids in the mornings, making footprints in the frost, and black crows, calling in the silence, flying against a white sky. I have to remind myself that it's March, and that by now, there are cherry blossoms starting to bloom back home. When I turn twenty-seven next week, it will be the first time in my life that I have celebrated my birthday in Autumn. 

Most days, we wake up in the middle of the night to go to work. At 4 a.m., the stars are still bright in the sky, and the world is quiet.

Getting out of bed is the hardest part of my day. The alarm comes out of the dark, startling me out of sleep (already? ). Everything around me is comfortable and soft; but I know that I have to get out of bed and get dressed, have to experience that cold air on my skin while I hurry to pull on jeans, socks, sweater. Deep breath. Steel myself for it.

Once I'm dressed, I'm fine.

Every morning, I make toast for two while John packs lunch, enough to keep us going through the long shift. It's strange, though: working in the vineyards, I was always hungry; now, I often have to remind myself to eat. Maybe it's the exhaustion, taking precedence.

The contractor picks us up at 4:30, and we drive around town for fifteen minutes, picking up other backpackers from their hostels. I most often work with Tina, from Ireland, Tim, from Wales, and Roberta, from Italy. People from all over the world work at the factory, though: Brazil, Japan, the Philippines, India, Sweden, Argentina, Taiwan. Not just backpackers, either. Most are permanent staff, in their 30s and 40s, and most have immigrated to New Zealand hoping to find a better life.

We relieve the night crew when we get to work. One of them is my flat mate, Alan, also from Ireland; and Maartin, from Belgium, works nights too, since John set him up with the job. Every day, I'm reminded that, although I work twelve hours a day, at least I don't work overnight. However, they always look surprisingly cheerful.

The factory is enormous and loud. It extends back into the distance like a Wal-Mart, and is about thirty feet tall at the peak. If you look at it the right way, you can tell that it's actually shaped just like a huge barn, on a concrete slab, built out of corrugated plastic, like a shed. Storeys-high towers of bottles, and stacks of pallets full of cases of wine, reach a kind of vanishing point so you can never quite see the back walls. Determined-looking men zoom around on fork lifts with flashing lights, honking their horns, leaving tire tracks of an inexplicable gray powder on the concrete floors.

The machinery is a symphony in itself. There is a different kind of alarm for everything that can go wrong, and they all sound insistently and repeatedly. The engines driving the conveyor belts, and the clanging of bottles, not to mention the music blasting, converge into a deafening rhythmic noise. Last week, the sound of the entire factory was overwhelmed by the terrifying, heart-stopping noise of 1,200 empty bottles falling fifteen feet onto the concrete floor. It was the loudest sound I've ever heard.

The wine sits in tankers outside - big, cylindrical, silver tanks just like the ones that carry fuel. It's brought into the factory with a hose, and hooked up to a machine called the Filler (no imagination there). Apparently, the Filler also washes and seals the bottles, but I guess that filling the bottles is its most important job. The empty bottles themselves are brought to the Filler by the De-Palletizer, where Tim works. It is very noisy: as each layer of empty bottles is pushed onto the belt, hundreds of them sound like reverberating instruments against each other.

The filled bottles then pass through the the Washer (currently broken) and the Labeler (constantly breaking down). Deepak, from India, works the label machine, and slips me new labels every day, which I collect on my bed-side table and intend to send home with a letter someday. John is in charge of the Box Machine and the Over Packer - so, in charge of making boxes and getting bottles into them. Then there's the Palletizer, which stacks all the cartons onto pallets and wraps them. In between, I fold dividers and slide them down between the bottles, before the boxes are sealed.

There are different shapes of bottles, different sizes of boxes, labels, and caps, so everything needs to be constantly adjusted. I often see John running back and forth with wrenches in his back pocket, tweaking his machines.

Sometimes, for one reason or another, the owners don't want the wine labeled or boxed yet, just bottled. That means we have to put the "Clean Skins" bottles onto pallets for storage. Usually, us girls will work the Clean Skins machine: Roberta, Tina, and myself. It's a wide belt, big enough for 14 x 14 bottles, and we have to work an overhead machine that hydraulics up and down to suck up the bottles, then swings around to deposit them onto the pallet.

Other times, when there isn't much else to do, we put stickers on the boxes ("case label"), make dividers, sweep, or hand-label bottles (usually little medallion stickers that say things like "International Wine Show: Silver Medal"). Sometimes we have to watch thousands of bottles go by, looking for crinkled or imperfect labels, which is the worst job ever; or we have to peel the bad labels off, which is the second worst job. Sometimes, when a machine is broken, we have to hand-load the bottles into the boxes, which I usually do with John. Yesterday, the two of us hand-loaded some 40,000 bottles into 6-packs, which was a real arm work-out, to say the least. This was during our 70th hour of work this week, and it took more than two hours: at quitting time, the night crew relieved us.

In New Zealand, they call coffee breaks "Smoke-O's." For awhile, I tried to hold onto my terminology and call them Coffees or Fifteens, but I've since surrendered. During my shift, I get three paid Smoke-O's and one half-hour lunch break, which means that I only have to work for two or three hours at a time. The staff lunch room has everything you could need: lockers, reading materials, couches, dining tables and chairs, a toaster, a microwave, a fridge, tea, coffee, sugar and milk, lots of dishes, and a dishwasher. It even has a warming cabinet where you can keep things like steak pies, which they eat a lot of here.

I would say that the worst part of the wine factory is the 12-hour shifts. We start at 5:00 a.m., and finish at 5:00 p.m. I am getting used to it now, but it is exhausting. I try to get as much sleep as I can, eight hours if possible, but that only leaves three hours of free time a day (I am not including the ride to and from work). That's barely enough time to shower and eat, never mind go to the shop for groceries, check e-mails, read, or stay on top of laundry. Most nights, we head to bed around 8:30 p.m.

The repetitive work isn't so bad, actually: we have music, and each other. It's easy work, and time passes.

But the best part of the wine factory is the people. Everyone is in the same boat, and everyone is unfailingly kind and cheerful (with the exception of Pam, the often psychotic, and occasionally sweet, supervisor). Deepak has invited us to his house to learn to make samosas and Indian bread. Marshall, a universally beloved Maori supervisor who radiates happiness, calm, and positivity, has taken such a shining to John that he's given him a family heirloom: a hand-carved bone necklace representing family, which he has asked John to pass on to his son someday. Tina and Roberta have become great friends of mine, and we chat and joke all day at work, which helps to pass the time.

I hope that some of these people will help me to celebrate my birthday next week, as well as Lindsay from Nova Scotia, the Irish lads, and Donelle, my cousin. I feel that this Saturday will be a special day for me, because of, or despite, the circumstances. I find it unbelievable that I will be 27: an age when all my family a generation ago were married with children, and here I am, living like a young adult, making plans to travel the world. Strange.

Getting older has shocked me, but it doesn't upset me.

I have the feeling that the best is yet to come.