As a good mate of mine likes to say ‘it’s the non-sexy shit that makes you money’.
On Ken Pahlow’s behalf: “moving stuff” (our winery is small) rivals cleaning as the least sexy part of winemaking.
Paying the bills.
You’re only as clean as your dirtiest guy. I like cleaning, and I like moving stuff. I also enjoy a nice sales trip.
However, because we have our own old bottling line (which is awesome), we don’t label at the same time. And I hate labeling.
Lol. MAKERS! 
Anyhow, my question was why not pawn it off if it’s your most hated activity?
If financially it’s not too bad to hire minimum wage help. And if they hate it… why not do more value added work with their valuable time?
About 30 years ago, that’s what hospital management believed - that it was cheaper to hire minimum wage employees to clean the equipment, because you could always cover up their blunders by administering antibiotics to the affected patients.
I.e. (antibiotics == inexpensive) && (skilled labor == beaucoup $$$s)
Personally I always thought they should task the med students with sterilizing the equipment, because the labor would be free and there would be an outside chance that the equipment might actually get sterilized.
Anyway, fast forward a few decades, and every surface in every hospital in the USA will, when swabbed, test positive for MRSA & VRSA & Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae & Super-Gonorrhea & every manner of lethal creep-crawly micro-parasite which even the most talented science fiction authors are incapable of imagining.
The moral of the story being that, if you want something done right, then you gotta do it yourself.
Then shouldn’t the Winemakers be out there harvesting all the grapes themselves? That theory just doesn’t fly.
Pulling the green jacks out of the bins as the wine is being crushed while earwigs are crawling all over you was definitely one of the least sexy jobs I’ve had.
Adam Lee back posted a photo a few years back when he was checking grapes for Siduri. It was something like a gas station microwaved burrito stuffed in the center console of his car at 4am, with a caption like “this is the winemaker’s life”. Keeping it real!
I’m not ITB, so never had to deal with the financial aspects luckily, but have made wine on/off for about 10 years. To be frank, its almost all unsexy drudgery or hard labor, paired with a few critical and potentially stressful decisions thrown in for good measure. But its also thrilling and nothing quite compares. Kinda like when you ask someone why they run a marathon or climb a mountain, you do it because you enjoy it, or you soon stop.
You can’t outsource cleaning when you’re so small you don’t have any employees (or budget for employees).
One of the least sexy things I’ve had to do was rake the stems from one end of a dumpster to the other. After destemming, we would dump the stems into a dumpster, but only had access to one end of it. After a few days of this, the stems get piled up on that end, and so someone needs to jump in and rake the stems to the other end so we can dump more in. That dumpster becomes a buffet for fruit flies and yellow jackets, so after a week or two of harvest, you just hope for a breeze to clear the air a little while you’re in there, and you need to hose yourself off when you get out.
Great responses so far…thanks. My parents are fruit growers in the Yakima Valley, so my job growing up was always on the farm. While I know this isn’t winemaking, but it’s agriculture. The least sexy part of the job was smudging. We’d have to get out of bed in the wee hours in the Spring when frost alarms started going off and head out into the bitter cold to lug around a propane tank lighting smudge pots. You had to hustle, too, because temperatures often dropped very quickly. Why did temperatures always seem to bottom out at 3:30 a.m.? The exciting times where when there was a little propane leak and, upon ignition of a pot, you were standing in a quick “pool” of ignited propane. It really put a skip into your step! That was certainly NOT a sexy part of agriculture, and it’s something I’m sure many winemakers have also had to do.
Winery-specific, I also always thought cleaning the inside of fermentation tanks would be both nasty AND claustrophobic. No thanks!
Maybe not the worst thing, but I am not looking forward to putting on netting in the 100 degree heat this weekend.
This is the whole problem of our economy: all the pencil pushers think tasks should be dumbed down to increase profits. Where is the dignity of labor?
I make everything look sexy. It’s my cross to bear.
[Humility, of course, being another critical trait in winemaking]
Paying bills, 401k plan set up, figuring out health insurance, filling out anything to do with OSHA and anything with the word “audit” in it.
I’ve climbed into yellow jacket swarmed dumpsters to fish out dropped pomace bins. That’s not super sexy. Cleaning out the catches in drains after lots of barrel cleaning and/or the end of harvest. Plenty of things that deal with foul smelling and/or dead varmits that are decidedly not bringing sexy back.
Echoing some from Ian, Nola, and Jim–
The business side. Cleaning usually has a start and end- what is dirty becomes clean- but the business side is a never-ending, ever changing, maze of pure unsexy.
I used to work at a trust company moving qualified retirement plans. The ppwk for the TTB and OLCC is much easier.
For me it’s the compliance. We make what’s considered contraband and we need to count the bullets a lot. And then figure out how to express that in gallons.
Cleaning is great! Music on, cellar door open, views across the valley. Give me winery work anytime. You can take you “how much wine did you ship into IL this month?” The thing with compliance is - you tell them everything and then they’re pretty much always saying, fine, approved. It’s like getting your car searched, they say all looks good, and you go on your way but you’re like, really, is that necessary?
Cleaning is fine. As someone said, need to turn it into a zen thing.
-Al