To welcome in the month of September today feels like a forced goodbye to summer. I’m confident that the students and teachers in our lives would agree. Of course, I had experienced a particularly enjoyable summer as I was on sabbatical for six weeks of July and August. Combined with the first six weeks I was away in April and May, gave me a real taste of a schoolteacher-like holiday. I hope the teachers are feeling just as rejuvenated for their return to work as I did.
My time away included an extended time of wandering out west. This included three days of exploring the vineyards and wineries of Walla Walla, Washington. I’ve often said, “If I could do it again, I’d love to be a winemaker.” In my travels and during my previous career as a restaurateur, I’ve been lucky enough to meet a lot of winemakers and grape growers and the wine industry has always been a fascination for me.
During one of my stops, I was lucky enough to reconnect with Chuck Reininger, the founder and winemaker of his eponymous winery. As we were visiting in his tasting room, he was distracted by a text message he received. “Shoot” he exclaimed as he looked up from his phone. He stared at me curiously for a few seconds and then asked, “is there any chance you’d like to help me bottle some wine tomorrow morning?” My jaw dropped. “Are you serious?” I excitedly replied, “that would be so cool!”
Because of scale, it doesn’t make sense for wineries like Reininger to invest in their own bottling equipment. Instead, whenever they have wines that are finished barrel aging and ready to be bottled, they bring in a mobile bottling trailer that has all the necessary equipment on board. It takes about 10 people to run the system smoothly and someone had just cancelled on Chuck for the next day’s bottling run. Lucky me!
The next morning, I joined the winery staff plus a few other volunteers like me and we were assigned our positions along the bottling line in the back of a semi-trailer. Over the course of about four hours, we bottled four different wines, filling about 300 cases. My job was to lift the filled, corked, and labeled bottles off the conveyor, return them to the previously emptied boxes, and seal the case back up again. For me, it was like being Charlie in the Wonka Chocolate Factory! And the best part was, I got paid in wine, including a few bottles of the yet-to-be-released 2021 Walla Walla Syrah that I helped to bottle.
One of the other delights of that morning was visiting with the winery staff and other volunteers who, like me, had been recruited to help. They were locals who regularly lent a hand on days like this and loved the experience (and the salary of wine!). Fittingly, the guy who showed me the ropes at my station was an elementary school teacher who was helping out during his summer break. He said mornings like this were some of the highlights of his whole vacation. In the coming months, when I’m having a particularly draining day of ministry, or my new schoolteacher comrade is tired of his classroom, I suspect we’ll both daydream about being back in the winery.
If you could have a chance to “do it all over again,” what other vocation would you consider giving a try? God has blessed us with so many varied interests and abilities. Taking advantages of opportunities to “work” in a different role or industry, might also be a way to explore how to live more fully as the unique person God created you to be. Where will you daydream of being next? Me? I’ll be back in the winery, September is harvest time and I’ll bet they could use me.
May God’s peace find you today. -Pastor Peter
Let us pray… God of vocation, you have endowed us with so many interests and abilities. Help us uncover the places we might use them for the sake of the world. May each opportunity become a source of delight. Amen.