Marlborough Man (and Woman) (Jun. 6 - 18)

First off, I know this post is long, and Becky even said so, but she was unwilling/unable to edit it, and I couldn’t bear to part with any of my laboriously constructed prose, so it pretty much all remains here, unabridged. So we understand if you’ve got to skim, but we haven't posted in awhile, and if you have even the slightest interest in grape pruning, you really owe it to yourself to settle in and read the whole thing, I think. And really, are you in such a hurry to get back to your real work, c’mon… (Although I realize now that by adding this intro it only lengthens the post, can't win for trying)

One of the things that I can’t say I expected to take away from the trip, but indeed will, is the idea that work can be a healthy and necessary thing. Who knows, that could just be my travel-fried brain talking, or a bizarre cry for help? Anyway, we’ve found that continuous traveling is fun at first, becomes tiring after a few months, and after 4 or 5 months has convinced us that an honest day’s work has its merits! Not an outcome I would’ve bet on, maybe it’s just our strong American work ethic shining through…

To that end, we’ve been up here in Blenheim (up here being a relative term, Blenheim is only north compared to the rest of the South Island, and Antarctica) to do vineyard work. Blenheim is the major city of the Marlborough region, famed for its sunny climate and wines, specifically the Sauvignon Blancs that NZ has made much of its oenophilic reputation on. I’ve never been to the Napa Valley or any other major wine-producing region before coming here, but with the amount of vines in this area, I have to imagine Marlborough is becoming much like those places.

Seriously, driving along the highway here one sees row upon row of wire-trained vines, stretching as far as the eye can see, to the dry brown hills in the distance. There aren’t many other crops to speak of, which makes sense since we’ve heard that the amount of area covered by grapes in Marlborough has doubled in the last 5 years. It’s pretty amazing, and if you’re a fan of wine, you’re definitely in luck around here. One of the big things for tourists to do here is to rent a bike and tool around, doing tastings at various wineries, which seem to be only a few hundred meters apart in the country here. As a motorist though, it is a bit disconcerting trying to avoid all the bikes, more than a few wobbling their way down the highways after the 5^th stop on their Tour de Plonk.

The Montana vineyard in the early morning

Getting jobs in pruning season in Marlborough is, as the Kiwis would say, easy as. There are heaps of vines in need of pruning and wrapping and plenty of contractors or companies to work for. However, we’ve heard horror stories of people being mistreated or even being stiffed on their pay by unscrupulous contractors, so we were a little leery of most of them. For instance, many contractors advertise on the internet, but they’re apparently not good, since if they were any good they’d get enough workers from word-of-mouth in the area and at hostels. Pruning work is basically the perfect job for backpackers, as it doesn’t require much training, doesn’t pay very well, and is very casual, meaning you can start or quit basically whenever you want. That’s the only way it’s casual; based on our few weeks of doing it we’d say that it’s pretty hard work.

Since we had a car, we just took jobs for a few weeks with Montana, which is probably NZ’s biggest wine house, and reputed to be a place that paid on time, which was our major criteria. Because when you’re doing manual labor, we could think of few things worse than not being paid. At Montana the jobs are pretty much divided by gender, with guys doing pruning, which is more strenuous, and girls doing the wrapping, which is fussier work. Since girls are fussy this makes good sense to me. I’d also note that even though it was only women doing wrapping, they had a male supervisor – this also makes good sense. Pruning and wrapping work is largely done on a piecework basis, but at Montana they’ll pay the minimum wage for awhile, after which you can go on a piecework rate or be asked politely to leave.

Blenheim before the sunrise. Andrew wanted photographic evidence to prove that he was actually awake that early.

Pruning involves using a big cutter to cut off most of the big canes from the vine, then stripping out the cut canes and trimming off all the little branches from the canes that are left to grow in the next season. Doing the big cuts was easy, except when you’d have to cut through some really thick wood stumps. After a bunch of those your forearms begin to complain that this wasn’t what they’d agreed to. Stripping was probably the most strenuous part, since you’re basically yanking canes which are tangled up in wires and other parts of the vine. The canes are very springy and will whack you across the head, face, or back without mercy – best not to do this work if you’re in the habit of paying a swear jar. Dropping in my two cents, wearing a hat and safety glasses is a must while stripping, as it’s surprisingly dangerous. Trimming wasn’t bad, except if you do too much without stretching your hands your hands might swell up like Becky’s, or you’ll find it strangely hard to do demanding tasks like squeezing toothpaste, as I did one day.

Andrew proves that you need a stud to prune vines.

Pruning one plant on a piecework basis earns you NZ$0.65 per plant, which means you need to do about 18 plants an hour before reaching minimum wage. Pruning upwards of this many plants an hour requires some serious-ass hustle. Unless you’re a pruning prodigy it would probably take you a few weeks to get up to contract speed. Since we were only there for a few weeks, getting minimum wage was alright with us.

On my first day, I got about 48 plants pruned, which is nowhere near the minimum. Over my two weeks at Montana I got up to about 110, which is still about 30 plants short, but I’d be hard-pressed to figure how to do them much faster. Perhaps I would’ve developed even better technique and a nicely-conditioned upper body to crank through the required quantity, but I can’t say I’m too disappointed at not getting to find out. Even though I was on an hourly rate, I was often working as hard as I could, which I blame on a goofy competitive streak. Granted I wasn’t brilliant at the work, but it was still way harder than I’d ever worked for minimum wage before. In that light, it was a bit disheartening to watch other workers, mostly European backpackers and older Kiwi blokes, in nearby rows cruising past you, especially when you can’t figure out how exactly they’re doing it much more quickly. Best to let it go I suppose…

Wrapping consists of taking the pruned canes and fixing them to the horizontal wires strung along the rows with what are essentially baggie ties. Wrapping a plant will earn you NZ$0.28, meaning a lady needs to do about 40 plants/hour to earn her keep. Unfortunately for the wrappers, their speed is largely dependant on whether the pruners in their row did a good job or not. If they left nice canes without a lot of old viney bits on them, the wrappers can cruise along, sweet as. If they left thick canes or canes that still needed to be trimmed, they’d be seriously slowed down. Since pruning is a piecework job and there isn’t what you’d call heaps of supervision out in the middle of a sea of vines, you’d be right if you guessed quality wasn’t always Job Number One.

That's a wrap!

Like me, Becky got better at her job over time, but never got really close to making more than minimum. Sorry Montana, guess we’ll be laughing all the way to the bank with our hardly-earned minimum wage! I do find it pretty amusing that I have moments where we feel like we took them slightly, although that’s pretty ridiculous when I consider that we were working really hard, pruning in below-freezing weather with the sun barely peeking above the horizon.

Since we were in Blenheim, I also got some time in with Brian and Andy at Renaissance. We dropped by unannounced one day and had a great time catching up, and Brian invited me back to help do some labeling work. We didn’t end up doing much labeling, but Becky and I did spend a day there as I helped Brian with a brewing session. All in all, I didn’t really do too much work, and we probably distracted Brian from real work as much as anything, but we had a blast and he enjoyed having us around as well. We even stopped by his house for dinner with his family and will certainly be back through before we leave the South Island.

Brian and Andrew working on a tasty brew

As a pruning post-mortem, we’d say that pruning and wrapping for a couple weeks was novel, but it was just about to lose its novelty, say after one or two more days. To any aspiring backpackers who think that it would be romantic and just incredible to work on a vineyard, we’d say “Eh, not so much.” Having an iPod to listen to was clutch, as it made the day go by more quickly, so unless you can hum the whole Beatles songbook, we’d recommend bringing along some tunage. We worked on the vineyards for a couple weeks largely to do it, learn something new, and kill some time before Marie and Alex got here, and so we didn’t have a terrible time. But if we were stuck here with no money and had to do a season of pruning in the NZ winter, we’d be singing a much different and way more depressing tune. Our advice: work hard in your home country where you can make a decent hourly rate and bring along plenty of money so that you don’t have to bust your hump for months in the cold and possibly develop repetitive stress disorders. If you insist on pruning though, be sure to bring plenty of warm layers!