I have a few but can’t tell them, I’m owned by the company.
I have some juicy ones.
I have never experienced a FAIL scenario myself, and probably never will because I AM perfect.
0voters
And with this comment lifted from another thread, I think it’s time to officially open the Winemaking FAIL Thread. All the stories of imploding tanks, exploding barrels, press failure at 2 am, green interns, mixed up lots and so on and so on …
One of my favorite stories, told to me by the guilty party …
In the early days at Wild Horse when Ken was just getting started, he didn’t have Guth valves or locking doors on his tanks. One day the guilty party was driving the forklift through the cellar and the frame of the forklift hit the tank door and ripped it off. 8,000 gallons of red wine shot out of the door like it was coming from a giant fire hose. Ken kicked off his shoes, stripped off his shirt and threw himself against the door, trying to close it, but he couldn’t–the wine just poured over and around him. As the wine emptied, the tank crumpled inward like a pop can.
Just the other night I started racking some wine to tank and forgot to close the bottom tank valve - d’oh! Fortunately I caught it before we lost very much wine, but working late at night after a long day can make you stupid, that’s for sure.
This is very minor, but still amusing. A few years ago I was helping out an an unnamed winery during crush. I was standing atop the catwalk next to the press, moving the hopper so the winemaker could maneuver the forklift, dump pinot gris and distribute it evenly. It was a warm year so the gris was pretty dark, but after one bin got dumped I looked into the press and exclaimed, “That’s the darkest damn pinot gris I’ve ever seen!”
No big deal, he’d just had a brain fart and dumped a bin of pinot noir into the press. “Oh well,” he said. “It will be a minor component and we can still label it as pinot gris.”
One year our old press wasn’t working correctly, so we had to operate it in manual mode. I forgot to close the doors before starting it to rotate… ended up with a press pan full of must. Thankfully, we didn’t really lose anything - but I felt like an idiot.
So many stories, and the worst one I ever witnessed was very similar to Mary’s story about Wild Horse and the forklift ripping open the tank door. It started out as 1,600 gallons of Chardonnay, and with Michael Michaud’s strength holding the door closed, I managed to tighten the spin handle on the door. We saved 500 gallons–insurance paid for the other 1,100. My assistant, who will remain nameless, was the forklift driver that day.
But my funniest story was during the harvest of 2004. I was doing punchdowns on a bunch of 5 ton fermenters one morning. The moveable “catwalk” that we stand on above the tanks was a little farther away from the edge of the tank than I would have liked. Rather than going back down the ladder, moving the ladder to get closer to the “catwalk,” I decided to jump onto the catwalk from the edge of the tank. One foot made it onto the catwalk, the other foot and the rest of me landed in 5.2 tons of 50 degree, cold-soaking Thomas Road Pinot Noir. Michael Browne and John Oglesby were the two witnesses that morning. The 3 of us had a good laugh. Without a change of clothes, I lined the seat in my car with garbage bags, and drove to the Old Navy in Santa Rosa. And yes, I did return to the winery to finish the punchdowns.
Quick one for me (I have more that I’ll share later).
I was in New Zealand in 2003, and the winemaker (now deceased, a damn shame) was farting around with some left-over Riesling. He decided to freeze it out and make some sticky. After a week or so at really low temps, he racked the juice out and left the ice.
He then asked me to clean up the tank. The tank was a double-decker, so the drain valve was about 6 ft off the ground. My first instinct was to open it up before going up top to start rinsing and then cleaning.
Unfortunately, lost in the communication was that there was still ice in the tank…or it least it had been ice earlier. So I reached up and opened the drain valve and 35 degree water came rushing out all over me like an emergency shower. No change of clothes for me, unfortunately, and no Old Navy. I had to gut it out and wait to dry…damn near caught pneumonia.
Some other incidents I’ll leave to your imagination:
forgetting to put the top bar (that holds the bin on the forklift) on a rotating head prior to dumping bins of grapes or, worse, pomace
sprinkler heads from machine-picked fruit making their way into a bladder press
diminished recognizance of the cardinal rule: “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey”
taking off the wrong clamp on racking and drain valves in full tanks
lack of venting when emptying and filling tanks
forklift hydraulic hoses or high-pressure fittings bursting with loads 10ft in the air
forgetting to tare the box scale prior to weighing 20 bins
having bags of DAP and tartaric acid that look very similar very close to one another in a chemical storage room
non watertight GFI’s or high-voltage receptacles in a working cellar
fire sprinkler pipes at a constantly-pressurized 130 psi that weren’t cut correctly and fail…one by one.
new tanks dropped off in the summer where you can see daylight looking at where the racking port “weld” was supposed to be
hydrometers - oh how I hate thee
interns who insist on bringing their cell phone with them up to do punchdowns. lots of dead soldiers and insurance claims
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