Nigel Kinsman was a young musician working in an Adelaide wine shop in the late 1990s when well-regarded winemaker Peter Leske came in for a trade tasting of his Nepenthe wines. “I tasted three of his wines and said, ‘Here’s the deal, I want to come work for you’,” Kinsman recalls. “‘I don’t have any experience, but I will work for free.’ We got along fairly well, so he took me on as a vintage intern.”
Eight years and eight harvests later, each performed at a different winery, Kinsman felt ready to take on a full-time winemaker’s job. “I did four harvests while I was studying for my degree at the University of Adelaide and four after graduation, including one in Italy,” he recalls. “I was a little different in that I was looking for mentors and not the location of the winery; people I could learn from and who could introduce me to other winemakers they knew.” After most recently making wine at the Araujo Estate in Napa Valley, Kinsman now has his own consulting winemaking company in California.
The interns
Kinsman is a prime illustration of what is becoming standard practice within the wine-producing industry — young winemaking students, as well as older people seeking to switch careers, get their professional starts by first interning at wineries for one or more harvests. When they become winemakers, they repeat the process.
Increasingly, the work of harvest interns — known as “cellar rats” because they seldom see the light of day — can be as important on job resumes as having a university degree in oenology or viticulture. The contacts interns make, both with winery employees and with fellow interns from around the world, become like joining a fraternity where everyone bonds during exhausting days of pulling around gigantic hoses and driving forklifts that can run up to 16 hours straight. And working harvests in more than one place provides a form of “street cred” within the industry.
“You can learn only so much from books and lectures,” says Brad Greatrix, who makes sparkling wine at Nyetimber, the largest producer in England, with his wife Cherie Spriggs, who is head winemaker. After university, the Canadian couple set off on what Greatrix calls “a self-imposed few years of travelling to wine regions, each with little notepads in our pockets”.
The journey took them to McLaren Vale and Central Otago in New Zealand, Hunter Valley in Australia, Margaux in France and the Willamette Valley in Oregon. At each stop, their experiences were doubled because Greatrix and Spriggs would intern at different wineries.
“At Nyetimber, we now hire about 30 or so interns every year,” Greatrix says, “because as a sparkling wine producer we work 24 hours a day between the press house and the winery.”
The actual work
What jobs are involved in being an intern, how do they and wineries hook up and how are travel, lodging and salary arrangements handled?
Manuel Lobo, winemaker at Quinta do Crasto in Portugal’s Douro region, says he hires six to eight interns each harvest, usually for September and October. “Mostly typically, vintage work will include such things as vineyard sampling and grape maturation controls,” he says, as well as pump overs, barrel filling, cleaning the cellar, micro vinification and other work as required.
But the experience is far from standard. Although Sierra Zeiter grew up in California’s grape-intensive Lodi region, she was not from a farming family and lacked experience when she graduated from California State Polytechnic University. “My first internship was at a custom crush facility, and I learned a lot of organisational skills there, dealing with a huge number of individual lots and working with different winemakers,” she says.
Next was a harvest at Daou, a high-end, smaller winery. “I got to do everything, from walking through every row five times, tasting grapes to see if they were ready to working in the lab. There were just two interns, so we sometimes worked 16-hour days six days a week. It was one of my favourite jobs.” At her final internship, at the very large producer, J. Lohr, she performed the same lab tests every day for the entire period. When she was offered the winemaking job at Oak Farm in Lodi, she knew she was prepared.
Jesse Katz, whose father did professional wine photography in Bordeaux, knew early what he wanted to do — make Bordeaux-style wines. “I wanted to only study Bordeaux varieties and I wanted experience in both hemispheres,” he says. “Every intern step was planned.” That took him from Napa Valley to Argentina and finally to the exclusive Petrus in Pomerol. In 2009, he founded the appropriately named Aperture Winery in Alexander Valley.
Not surprisingly, such demanding but rewarding experiences build camaraderie. Hélène Seillan, now a winemaker at the Jackson family’s Vérité in Sonoma County, grew up in a Bordeaux wine family and says: “Interns have been a part of my life forever. They would sleep at our house and when we had time we would all go to rugby matches.”
Todd Graff, general manager and winemaker at Frank Family winery in Napa Valley, has been in the wine business for more than 30 years and hires five or six interns each harvest. “My first two vintages were at Joseph Phelps, where nothing went wrong,” he recalls. “Then I went for a harvest in Australia, where we would regularly lose water and power. It was all duct tape and bailing wire. But along the way, I met lifelong friends.”
One of them was Kim Crawford, the New Zealand wine icon, who shared Graff’s Aussie experience. Many years later, in 2017, Crawford’s son Rory interned with Graff at Frank Family. Graff says he and his interning friends keep in touch. “We talk all the time, and recently we’ve been sharing experiences during the virus lockdown.”
“Coming up in the wine industry, I was extremely fortunate to be mentored by great winemakers, great cellar masters and great colleagues in the cellar,” says Jim Close, winemaker at Gamble Family Vineyards in Napa Valley. “So now, one of the most satisfying aspects of having seasonal workers, trainees and interns is the opportunity to pay this debt forward — part of the unwritten contract is to share the knowledge gained over the years. It also pays off for our operation, creating a safer, better motivated and critical environment.”
How it works
Although arrangements vary, interns these days seldom work for nothing.
“In France, unpaid internships are quite rightly not allowed,” says Danielle Rolet, whose family owns Chêne Bleu in the mountains of the southern Rhone, “and the salary bands are set by the government. For interns coming to us from further away, we usually house them at the winery. It can be a big ask to expect people to find an apartment in rural France. During harvest, we cook for the entire team at lunch, and the cellar and vineyard teams all eat together. As well as being a morale boost, this is a very important cultural practice in France.”
Many wineries help secure affordable housing before the intern arrives and may even work out transportation to and from work. Travel between the intern’s home base and the winery is generally the intern’s responsibility.
Many of the more famous wineries are flooded with applications, and there are old-girl and old-boy networks that vie for prime placements, particularly for children of owners and winemakers. But there are also professional agencies in most countries for agricultural interns that help vet them and secure the proper work visas. Online trade journals also carry advertisements.
“Finding motivated interns is getting more competitive,” says Frank Family’s Graff. “We begin advertising in January, although we prefer it if we get an intro.” He also says for nearby applicants he likes face-to-face interviews prior to hiring, “but that’s not possible this year because of the lockdowns.”
Some intern situations work out particularly well. Although primarily responsible for making wine at Vérité, Seillan also assists at Château Lassègue in Bordeaux, which her family co-owns with Jackson Family Wines. Her father also makes wines at his ancestral home in Gascony.
“At the last minute before harvest 2014, an intern from Germany had to cancel working a Vérité,” Seillan recalls, “and we said, ‘Oh no, can you get someone to send in your place?’” He could — Fabian Krause, a fellow graduate of the wine programme at Geisenheim. “Fabian showed up a little late, but after a while we started sort of eyeing each other,” Seillan says. “In the middle of crush, I had to go back to France and my father said, ‘Say, can you take Fabian with you to help out?’ I don’t think he knew about us, but it turned out to be a very romantic plane ride.”
Today, Hélène and Fabian are married and have a young daughter. Hélène continues to make wine for Vérité, Fabian is starting a Riesling programme for Jackson Family. If and when the time comes, their daughter will certainly have a good inside track for the best jobs being a cellar rat.
