That pretty much sums up the first couple of months of our life on a wine farm.
Let me start with my job (Neill will tell you about his in the Delores Diaries below).
I'll throw a few terms out - capsules, SAWIS, Vignerons, BG11's, ZebraDesigner, dosage, disgorging, cork taint, waybill, sustainability practices, VCC's...
These are all things that I knew practically zip about - but the journey up that steep curve involved collecting tools for my skills toolbox.
The first task was to get to know the wines.
My colleague, Jackie, had made me a folder with tasting notes of our 11 wines as well as other pertinent information about the tasting room, orders, sales etc. I thought I knew quite a lot about wine but soon realised that I didn't, and still had an enormous amount of learning to do. I signed up for an online wine course to refresh myself on some of the basics - like the characteristics of the various cultivars. I've finished both levels of that course and plan to start the more rigorous, international WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) course in the near future.
Anyway, listening and tasting helped me to become familiar with our wines, and my confidence in presenting and selling them increased. As you know, I love talking to people and I love wine, so talking to people about wine is certainly no punishment for me.
Getting to grips with the back-end of the wine business involves so many different things - orders, invoicing, freight, exports etc. as well as regulatory requirements like submitting BG11's to SAWIS (SA Wine Industry Information & Systems) to obtain certification for our wines to be exported. After the online process has been done - the information is recorded on "pink cards" - the most important source of information for the wine maker. It was a tad nerve wrecking at first, but the more I do - the more confident I get.
The ZebraDesigner label maker moved to my desk and Craig handed over the job of printing back labels for our bottles. As a boutique winery producing only about 85 000 bottles a year, a lot of our processes are manual and everyone is very hands-on. As a result, every label on the back of our bottles (telling you about the contents) is printed by us and stuck onto the bottles by hand. That job belongs to Candice our labeler, capsuler, packer, palette stacker and dispatcher.
Our entire staff compliment on the farm consists of 10 people - from winemaker to landscape technician. We're a lean, keen team that gets the work done.
The wine making process is fascinating and none more so than the making of Cap Classique. What an absolute treat to watch this process from start to finish. More detail about this in a forth-coming blog.
Another part of my three part job, is running the five cottages on the farm. Hospitality - mmmm, not without its challenges but by-and-large, so far we have had really nice guests. For seven or eight weeks were were closed due to the revamps we did and the paving of the road. This really helped me to get used to the systems and processes without having to deal with guests.
The first thing I had to learn was how to find my way around Booking.com. It's very easy as a guest, not so easy as a host. We also have a booking enquiry system on our own website which doesn't speak to Booking.com. I very quickly realised that this had potential for double-bookings, so I created a system for myself. Every booking that comes in is recorded in five places - Booking.com, our own website's back-end, a spreadsheet on my laptop (for the purposes of collecting data), a hardcopy calendar on my desk and on a whiteboard in the office (for Neill and our cleaning lady, Hannie to see). Rather arduous. Hopefully this will get easier when we have a new integrated website.
Then there is procurement. Linen - do we have plain duvet covers, or the Oxford style? White towels or dark grey? Do we need pillow protectors? What kind of mats should we have for the showers? Do we need a fitted sheet for our little cot? What fragrance of room diffuser should I choose? Finding the provider and choosing the items pushed me somewhat out of my comfort zone, but it got done. Then there are the little things have to be ordered and bought regularly. Toilet paper, coffee, tea, sugar, milk, dishwashing liquid, black bags etc. Let's just say Makro and I have become very close.
Some guests do require a bit of extra attention, but most are pretty chilled which is great. I've had requests for champagne in the room, extra wood, flowers, cards, balloons and the like, but I'm learning where to draw the line.
On one of the first weekends that we were full, we had a group of women who were celebrating a 50th birthday. It was just after we had installed an inverter and battery back up which had a fault and loadshedding was in full swing. As a result - there was no power, and the hostess had prepared a birthday meal which needed heating. So we brought everything back down to the manor house where we had a generator, heated it all up and returned it hot, with bottle of wine in hand to apologise. Later that night one of the ladies called Neill to ask him how she was going to make her morning coffee without power. Neill was not happy but bit his tongue and asked what time he could bring up a boiled kettle for her! Fortunately, the power was restored so ferrying hot water was not required. Oh well, all part of the job I guess.
Another time, we were without power for five days - placating our guests who could not have hot showers, access to Wi-Fi or use a microwave, required lots of sorrys, wide smiles, and a couple of bottles of wine but in the end, we still got a 10/10 rating on Booking.com!
An addition that I made, which I'm pretty chuffed with, is a "room book" for each cottage. This folder contains all the info needed for staying in the cottage as well as the history of the farm, info about the winemaker and our wines, restaurant and wine farm recommendations, things to see and do in the area, etc. And it was fun.
I even write the quotes on the chalkboard - which we made ourselves!
Setting a standard and working with others to keep it up, is somewhat of a challenge for me as I know what I want, but find it difficult to get others to be on board. The handles on the cannisters for the tea, coffee, sugar need to face the same direction! Training staff therefore became necessary to get everyone up to scratch.
As I mentioned, we're a lean team and we all jump in and do what's required, so a couple of times on a weekend I've had to go in and "turn a cottage over" for guests arriving that day. Neill gets called up from time to time to sort out tripped electricity, check a gas connection, drop off some wood and sometimes he just chats to them (yip, can you believe that!) telling them how to get up to the dam, where to go for walks and the like.
It's all in a day's work (and night).
The third part of my job is for another day...
A different kind of office! Stony Brook Vineyards tasting room with proteas that we pick on the farm.
Getting to know our wines
The back labels on our bottles. Candice (back) and Roche (who helps out when we have big orders) labelling our Cap Classique.
Weekly chalkboards
DELORES DIARIES
Snippets from Neill's voice notes...
"CONSTRUCTION! What a different ball game. And throwing weather conditions into the mix"
"The magnitude of repairs and maintenance work that needs to be done. There is just so much!"
"Terminology and standardisation - takes some getting used to"
"The terminology in the Western Cape is different to the Eastern Cape. For example HOOPLE. I ask for it at Agrimark and they don't know what it is. It has a different name here. It's like being asked "go and buy me a ball" but when I get there, I'm asked if it's a yellow tennis ball or a brown rugby ball. So I now I've resorted to drawing pictures - the universal language."
"There's no standardisation of water pipes for example so I have to break or cut a piece off to take with me so that I buy the right thing".
"...the shopping still seems strange to me! But things need to be bought and I need to buy them. From high strain steel wire for fencing to drain cleaner for cottage showers."
"Dealing with the elements. Persistent, excessive rain. Cold. Wind - even worse than PE."
"Taking on the responsibility of the farm over weekends. How to sort out water outages or leaks. Finding the DB boards, sorting out tripped electricity"
"Dealing with very different people - colleagues who are so different to my old colleagues - and guests - that is something very different for me. Things are much more fluid and less defined. Multi-tasking. Taking on things that I knew nothing about but now have to make them happen. Like putting the CO2 into the wine tanks when Craig is away. Managing the farm when there are very few processes in place."
"Learning a different lifestyle"
"Cohabiting with others every two to three weeks when the Fultons come down from PE"
These are just a few of the new tools that Neill is collecting along this learning curve - the list continues to grow.
Construction happening around the farm.
5 comments:
Lovely read, Bev!! Keep on learning, friend. It keeps you young ;)
Still so loving your blog, Bev. It sounds so much like 'A Year in Provence'!
Loving your blog Bev! Reminds me of the Erickson Times. Neill's snippets are so cool, I can hear his voice when reading these.
@Adriaan, the Erickson Times - now there's a memory! This is like the next-level digital-era version, and I love it too. I can also hear Neill's voice in those diaries!
Took me a while to get to read your blog, but hearing a lot of it in person, makes it "come alive"!
Continue living the dream my friends and remember, if you need any assistance, advice, or just a good old rant with respect to the Hospitality Industry, you have my number.
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