Showing up and Serving Others

Before my first week of college was done, I had signed on to do the nighttime punchdowns at Reininger Winery and would wind up working with them for more than 8 years. It was a fluke of a part-time job that turned into a fluke of a full-time job, and then a very full-time job, and then a profession and identity and way of life.  I didn’t see it coming quite frankly—the path was organic.  It was the classic “right place, right time” situation.

Balance with a low-oak profile, as well as being able to showcase what some lesser-known varietals are able to do and be.  You don’t get to see a lot of really high-end varietally bottled, low-oak Malbec or Cabernet Franc or Petit Verdot.

Also, because we are a small producer that sells out mainly from the wine club and out of the tasting room, our blends don’t have to fit some generic mold. We can really get creative. I love that.

I grew up in a bilingual household.  I was exposed to the difficulties that non-English-speakers have when trying to get and stay healthy.  It was clear to me from early on that a large portion of the winemaking community in Washington fit that profile and was not getting those basic needs met. Yet this free clinic already existed, just not a lot of us knew about it.

In the wine industry, it is hard to get insurance, since so many of us just work the crush pad for three months or year round in the tasting rooms, but only one day a week.  The vineyards and wineries in Washington are still young enough that when they hire people, it’s usually part-time, which leaves a big gap in insured workers.  I wanted to see if we couldn’t close that gap a little.

It isn’t very PC of me to say this, but I think the biggest problem is that women aren’t showing up in the first place.

Part of that might be because it is a physical job.  There have always been times where a lesser trained man could still outperform me simply because he weighed 60 to 80 pounds more, and what was really needed was to pallet jack 6 barrels into a tight corner.

But that’s not the majority of the profession by any means.  I’ve personally seen—and I mean repeatedly, women not applying for something that they could’ve learned quickly simply because they didn’t know it already.  I see that drastically less in men.  The bravado works in their favor in that realm, the hiring realm, and it’s ridiculous.

So that’s what I mean when I say women just need to show up.

There’s a great TED Radio Hour on this titled “Nudge” that I totally believe. The premise is that young girls learn things faster than boys of that same age—crawling, walking, language, potty training. So parents learn to expect perfection from their daughters while they expect resilience from their sons (i.e., you fell again, shake it off).

Women are taught from an early age that if they aren’t going to nail something—a resume, forklift driving, harvest—then they shouldn’t step foot in that arena. [They are told:] You aren’t going to nail harvest. That is a fact. You will do better some years and worse others, but you will never be fully in control. Nature has assumed that role.

So I think women shy away from looking underprepared or underqualified where men don’t. They show up, we don’t.