Chapter 13: Among the Cellar Rats
Jeremy led Heath and company through the gate in the high fence and past the hoppers, crushers and the huge horizontal basket press. Before entering the winery the group filed between two rows of outdoor stainless steel tanks, each with a small sign that said, “Owned and Leased by Grape Rancher Leasing Company,” the name of Delaney’s profit scheme. They entered through a heavy metal door and descended into the cellar room, a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse containing more than a hundred stainless-steel tanks. Jeremy knew he was to look for Gregor’s son down one of the alleys between the rows of tanks. He spotted him half-way down the fourth row, and the group veered left into the alley. The young man waved at Jeremy when he spotted his expected visitors.
“Mr. Barnes, what are you doing down here?”
“A long story, Sammy. We’re trying to find our way to the restaurant.”
“Let me take you up front. We’re not supposed to allow visitors to wander around here alone. I’ll be finished with this in just a second.”
Jeremy and the rest had an opportunity to inspect Sammy and the job he was about to complete. He was dressed in rubber boots, a full-length plastic apron, and long rubber gloves that went up to his elbows. He stood next to a hundred-gallon sump that resembled a commercial soup stirrer. A one-inch diameter steam hose snaked along the ground and up into the sump. His protective clothing kept the young man from coming into contact with a bright-blue, clay-like gunk that he was adding to the boiling water in the sump.
“Sammy, these are guests of Schloss up from LA for the weekend.”
Sammy put his hand out to Heath but quickly pulled it back after realizing his glove was covered with the sticky blue goo.
“Sorry.”
“Sammy, what are you doing? What is that stuff?” Jeremy asked.
“I’m making an addition, Mr. Barnes. We’re adding 75 pounds of potassium ferracyanide to this wine.”
“What wine?’
“The chenin blanc in this tank here.”
Sammy pointed at the shiny 20,000 gallon container that loomed over them. Heath’s mouth fell open.
“Did you say cyanide?” Heath gasped.
“Potassium ferracyanide. We have to add it to the wine after we make a big metal addition.”
“Metal addition?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve put copper sulfate in the wine.”
“Copper sulfate? Isn’t that poisonous?”
“Well, I guess that’s why one of the lab rats – excuse me, the lab assistants – weighs it out for us. Plus they put a sign on the tank telling us not to sample it.”
Even Pete’s curiosity was aroused. “Why do they put copper sulfate in the wine?”
“To get the hydrogen sulfide out. You know – the rotten egg smell.”
Reggie butted in; he wanted to be in charge of this interview session. “Now just a second, young man. This wine has a hydrogen sulfide problem? Why?”
“I don’t know. We just shipped it in from the dessert – the Central Valley – three days ago.”
“So you add a high-level dose of copper sulfate to it, and then you add this potassium ferracyanide to absorb the copper.”
“Yes, sir. They have us wear this gear because we could burn ourselves on the boiling water – and this gunk is supposed to be bad for us if we touch it.”
“Why do you put it in that hot water?”
“It won’t dissolve in cold water or wine. It just clumps up and falls to the bottom of the tank.”
“Aren’t the fumes from the boiling cyanide dangerous?”
“I guess they haven’t thought about that, sir.”
The visitors looked around and saw the blue cyanide on everything Sammy’s gloves had touched.
“You mix it in hot water and just pump it into the wine?”
“I’ll show you. I’ve got one more scoop to go and I’ll be finished.”
Sammy stuck his glove into the five-gallon bucket, scooped out the last gob of muck, and dropped it into the boiling, swirling water of the sump.
“After we mix it up with the water, we slowly pump it in.”
“Besides diluting it, doesn’t it turn the wine blue?”
“We mostly add this stuff to our red jug wines, so you can barely tell it’s in there. But when we add it to a white wine, it looks pretty wild.”
Sammy walked over and cracked the sample valve on the tank. Jeremy stepped beside him and put his hand under the spigot. The liquid flowing out was a brilliant blue.
Pete couldn’t contain himself. “Looks like that cheap German virgin wine.”
Heath frowned at him. This was serious. “And how do they extract the blue color from the wine?”
“We run it through a paper filter. We used to use asbestos but the government stopped that.”
“And then what?”
“We cold stabilize and – “
“Cold Stabilize?”
“We pump the wine through a heat exchanger overnight and then dump in some buckets of cream of tartar. Then we chill it some more. It gets the potassium tartrates out.”
“And then?”
“We bottle it.”
“As what?”
“A jug wine or a Chablis, I guess.”
Jeremy could see a figure approaching from the end of the alley. One by one, the visitors turned to look at the apparition.
“What is that?” Heath asked to no one in particular.
Pete the comic made a guess. “It looks like the ghost of Sitting Bull.”
The man coming at them was Theodore Roosevelt Bearfoot, a pony-tailed, six-foot-six, 300-pound Pomo Indian. The cellar rats called him Teddy. He was the only seasonal worker from the past year’s crush to have survived the winter lay-offs, mostly because he could drag two fifty-foot wine hoses around the winery without perspiring, and because the cellar sub-foreman, in charge of firings, was afraid to tell him goodbye. And trudging toward the visitors that night was a very big man covered from head to toe in a fine white powder, and he didn’t look the least bit amused by it.
As the clairvoyant for the group, Sammy communicated with the ghost. “Hey, Teddy. What’s the problem?”
“Goddamn shit,” Teddy said in his deep voice. “I hate putting this crap in wine. I gotta breathe it and mix it up with my hands and it gets in my lungs and I start sneezin’. I got it all over me.”
Sammy pointed at Pete. “This guy here says you look like Sitting Bull’s ghost.”
Teddy flashed a grin showing a gap where his two front teeth had been. He had lost them in a football game the year before he dropped out of high school.
“Oh yeah?”
Pete stepped behind Stephanie in the hope she would deflect the first blow. As if in slow motion, a laugh welled up inside of the big man and escaped. Teddy’s laugh sounded like Jeremy’s fuel-starved Rolls: “Ah-ha. Ah-ha.” As Teddy’s laugh subsided, he turned to stare down at Stephanie. After setting down the two five-gallon buckets in his hands, he pointed in her direction.
“This chick on the warpath?”
Stephanie’s face turned the color of ming pink. When Reggie realized that Teddy wouldn’t bite, he addressed the big man.
“By the way, sir, just exactly what is that powder on you?”
“I dunno. Sammy what do they call it?”
“PVP. Polyvinylpolypirrode. Ground-up plastic powder. We dump it into the wine to clarify it. They’ve found it’s cheaper than the old natural stuff we used to add, but it’s such a pain in the ass to mess with.”
“Why don’t you wear a mask when you mix it?”
“You’ve never tried to find a mask around here.”
“How do you remove it?”
“Oh, it settles out, I guess. Plus we filter the wine some more.”
The sulfuric steam rising from Teddy’s other bucket wafted past Stephanie and Alex, causing them to gag involuntarily. With his hand over his mouth, Pete asked Sammy where the dead smell was coming from.
“That’s potassium metabisulfate. Sulfur. We need to add a couple pounds to that zinfandel over there ‘cause someone left the lid open on the tank a couple nights ago.”
“So the wine’s oxidized?” Jeremy asked.
“Yeah. When I saw the layer of purple scum floating on that tank it looked like the surface of Mars.”
Pete butted in. “You’re adding pounds of sulfur? Reggie, aren’t they trying to link sulfites in food products with fatal reactions in asthmatics and others with an allergy to it?”
“Yes. Using it is such a shame, too,” Reggie answered his companion. “If they’d just use the care necessary to keep out the air, they wouldn’t need to put all those strange things into the wine.”
Teddy picked up his buckets and headed down the aisle. Reggie shook his head and turned to Jeremy. “Mr. Barnes, this is a side of winemaking I seldom see. For some reason the public relations people at these large wineries don’t take me on the working man’s tour. This all reminds me of the story I was once told about a large producer of jug wines in the Central Valley. In the story, the owner, an elderly man, gathered his sons around his deathbed to pass on his secret of winemaking to his heirs. He had them come close to him, and with the death rattle in his throat, he whispered, ‘The secret, my sons, is that you can use grapes, too.’”
Jeremy let out a hearty laugh and for the first time felt there was hope in his plot succeeding. Shedding his gloves, Sammy turned off the sump and motioned for his guests to follow him. He led his guests through the tanks toward the restaurant. Sammy guided the group out of the tank cellar and into the adjoining room, which was filled with strange-looking stainless steel machinery. It was the area not on the tourists’ itinerary when they were herded along the overhead catwalks by the minimum-wage tour guides. The room contained the diatomaceous-earth filter, the centrifuges, the heat exchanger and the sterile filters. It had been thought that the tourists would find the room contradictory to the image the winery was attempting to project, so it was conveniently excluded from their sight.
As this privileged group filed through, Alex nudged Reggie’s arm and pointed toward one corner of the room. A short, squatty man lay asleep on a pile of bags of diatomaceous earth. Reggie couldn’t hold back his curiosity.
“And who is that?”
“Oh. That’s Herb, sir. He’s feeling under the weather tonight.”
Like Teddy, Herb wasn’t in the script, but he still was a good cue for Jeremy’s lines. “Sammy, what are those bags he’s lying on?”
“Diatomaceous earth. Dirt. See, over there, Bill is using it.”
A worker was dumping a bucket full of the red powder into a sump of wine. A cloud of dust enveloped his head.
“We add it to the wine and then filter it back out. It’s an aid to filtering.”
“Isn’t diatomaceous earth carcinogenic? Doesn’t it cause cancer?” Heath inquired.
“I’ve read that it only causes cancer if it’s inhaled.”
“Why don’t you all wear masks?”
“Because we don’t have to.”
Management at Schloss was not strict on the wearing of paper masks, for a recent cost-cutting audit by the new Assistant to the Comptroller had disclosed that they cost a whopping seventy-five cents apiece, and those things add up. Reggie was still gazing at the sleeping cellar rat when Herb opened his eyes to stare back at him.
“What the hell you lookin’ at?”
Reggie turned away. Jeremy thought the situation was almost out of control. With his eyes he motioned for Sammy to get them out of there.
“Forgive him, sir. He’s not well.”
Herb wasn’t well because, since his shift began, he had consumed two liters of “soda pop,” the cellar rats’ nickname for the semi-popular Schloss white zin, the one that reminded Herb of Nehi Red. Herb was on his bi-monthly binge.
Sammy led his guest to a door and opened it. “Jeremy, this is as far as I’m allowed to go after 6 p.m. Just walk straight through this room to a door at the other end and take a right, and eventually you’ll end up at the restaurant. Nice meeting you.”
