DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We started with a floor-to-ceiling stack of empty wine bottles, three barrels and a dozen carboys full of wine from last year, and four huge bins of crushed grapes. The day’s agenda: bottle all the finished wine (86 cases!) and press all the new grapes (200 gallons!). Oh, and drink lots of wine — in the name of quality control, of course.

We had 20 people in three separate assembly lines. The first group managed the press: hauling buckets of crushed grapes to the press, filtering the juice, and pumping it into storage — some into oak barrels, some into glass carboys. This required some complex dance maneuvers. Once grapes had been poured into the press, the juice would run… so someone would have to hold the sieves and watch the catch basin, which would quickly fill… so someone else had to be ready to swap basins… but the full one would be needed shortly, so it would have to be emptied… so someone would have to hold a filtering screen above a plastic tub, which would quickly fill… so someone would have to pump off the juice into barrels, which would quickly fill — especially bad, because spilled juice in the cellar attracts vinegar bacteria, which could contaminate the entire winery, and nobody really wants 200 gallons of red wine vinegar, I don’t care how many salads they eat.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of hosing out of screens and tubs and wheelbarrowing off of empty grape skins.

I spent my time in the bottling group. The bottler is an ingenious device, a gravity-fed pan with three spigots. You have to suck each one to get them flowing, but so long as you don’t let them pull air, they’ll pour wine all day. Hang a bottle on each one, and the wine automatically starts to drain into it; when the bottle is full, the flow stops.

Full bottles were handed to the corker, who drove another manual device — basically a real long lever with a bolt at one end to push in the cork. Corking turned out to be nearly foolproof, although we did have one early bottle that somehow ended up with two corks in it. That may have been a ploy though (“I’ll take this defective one home with me!”).

We needed five people: one to feed bottles to the bottler, and cart away boxes; one to fill the bottles, an “expediter” to manage the passage of bottles to the corker and from there into boxes — this was me, which is why the position has a cool title — one to run the corking machine, and one to feed corks to it.

Standing in the middle of this provided a vivid education in process management. I wrote a nice review of a great book about process management last year; see The Goal. All those lessons came back immediately. There were as many opportunities for bottlenecks as there were people in this assembly line. If the bottler is fumbling to open a case of empties, or if he has nowhere to put the full bottle because the corker is behind, then the whole process stops. But optimizing a single stage would only reveal the next bottleneck in line. We made that line sing, I can tell you, but not without some concentrated effort. (The fact that we were all quaffing fresh vino wasn’t helping anything.)

Seriously, though, it was really satisfying to realize that fishing corks out of a bag doubled the time it took to put a cork in the bottle. This was the system’s biggest constraint, and it dictated the throughput of the entire operation. We appointed a “cork feeder;” within two minutes the backlog of full bottles dropped to zero… providing moments of valuable free time for the expediter to refill his tasting cup.

A third crew managed labeling: another 5-7 people doing a variety of things, but somewhat slowly because the first person in the line was doing too much: sliding the little foil lids on the bottles, lifting them from the ground, then holding them inverted in boiling water. Because my team was operating so efficiently we were able to take over the first two steps of this process, speeding up the labeling operation too. Woo!

Anyway, we bottled and boxed two cases of rose, about 70 of Cab/Syrah, and about a dozen of Pinot. I didn’t do one damn thing from my to-do list today, but it was the most productive day I’ve had in six months.

See photos of the entire process in my winemaking gallery.

Let me just say for the record that A Decade of Rock and Roll is a great classic rock album. I’m not ashamed to admit that I used to be a big fan of REO Speedwagon. On the other hand, I own two CDs from Marillion, which maybe ought to tell me something.

The Decade album, as we call it, contains a live version of the arena-rock classic, Ridin’ the Storm Out. Kevin Cronin’s introduction belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or maybe the Camp Hall of Fame (right next to his Gloria Vanderbilt jeans):

My friends, I’ve got time for one last story for you before we have to leave tonight. You see, if you’ve ever been in the Rocky Mountains after the wind comes up and the sun goes down, you can find yourselves in a whole lot of trouble, people. But what you’ve got to do is keep yourselves together, keep everybody warm, and always remember… to keep riding the storm out people! Come on with us one more time!

OK, you can put your Bics down now. Believe me, I understand.

Anyway, I was hiking in the Rockies a couple months ago when the sky went from gorgeous to ominous to dangerous in the space of 10 minutes. When the rain started to fall (sideways), everyone in my group was fumbling for emergency ponchos — those collapsible Hefty trashbag things that fit in a pocket. They’re hard to manage when the wind is tearing them from your hands. We were an hour’s hike from cover (trees don’t count) and had no alternative.

I was wearing a waterproof jacket already, so I had time to shoot a few pictures of my unfortunate hiking companions. The images don’t capture the stress of the moment. I mean, nobody really thought we were about to die, but lightning likes hikers. Especially wet ones. I thought my pictures might help the rescue team identify our smoking remains.

We zipped up and marched through the rain, promptly got separated, missed a turn, backtracked, sent out scouts, waited, courted death, and finally, once regrouped, started busting ass down the mountain. Which is a pity, because this hike — part of the Bierstadt Lake trail — comes down into a valley through a series of switchbacks. The views would be incredible, assuming the sky isn’t dark gray and you’re not running for your life.

Raphael thought this was a gas. Running is fun. Actually, to an 8-month old, just about everything is fun. Apparently being rained on is fun, because he kept poking his face out of my jacket, blinking away the raindrops and grinning up at the sky as if to say, “bring it on!” I guess that’s as good a reaction as any — certainly better than mine, which could be summed up as “please, not today!”

I guess that’s part of fatherhood. I thought I was pretty used to the idea of my own mortality after having ridden a motorcycle for 10 years. My 40-mile commute was an hourlong meditation on death, interspersed with cursing.

Needless to say, we survived the weather and lived to tell the tale, even dress it up a bit for dramatic effect. (You didn’t think I was really afraid of a little rain, did you? Wait, don’t answer that.)

And now for a moment of total nostalgia overload: apparently REO is co-headlining a show with Styx tomorrow night. Tomorrow night! Anybody want to fly me to Clearwater for the evening? Or at least, send me a concert baseball T with the 3/4 length sleeves and the vinyl band logo on the front. I can get my hair feathered in no time.

As seen from the deck.

In late August, my bassist friend Andrew (of Groove95 fame) went into the studio to mix down the first six songs for his upcoming solo CD. I was astounded when I heard the results — having heard most of these songs in every conceivable incarnation, from scratchy cassette demos to low-fi solo bass+click MP3s to my own questionable rough mixes, I never imagined they could shine. But, wow.

I’d played drum tracks for three of these songs in 2000. Drew and I actually rehearsed them in person once, but of course this was back before the internets. And we got together to track the drums, which were engineered by a mutual friend, now the proprietor of Creamy Sonic Studios in Dublin, who came to my old rehearsal studio to record me. We tracked six songs that day — a feat that blows my mind now, i.e. lately it takes me two months to record six songs.

So anyway, three of those tunes from 2000, plus Groove95, the drums for which I tracked here last Fall, were among the six tunes that have just been mixed down. Listening to them is the aural equivalent of picking up a dusty stone and rubbing it a few times to reveal a thousand-dollar hunk of opal. The production is first-rate — the mix engineer, Evan Rodaniche of Cage9, worked some kind of magic I don’t understand. The contributions of the other players are all extremely happening. These songs, especially the one-off pop/punk tune that still makes me laugh every time I hear it, belong on the radio. But I have to admit to a small amount of bias.

Needless to say, I will be shipping Evan my stillborn mixes from last Fall very soon. One song is ready to go, and the other will be in about 48 hours. I’ll post the final mixes here.

By the way, Andrew’s pending CD release also means I’m about to get my first engineering credit. Excuse me, I think that’s Bob Ludwig calling!

Jonathan Miller, head of the Time Warner’s Internet division, was at Web 2.0 last week. I was not paying close attention because I was busy surfing the web (a little conference humor there).

I heard him and John Battelle, the conference host, discuss a number. I missed whatever it was the number meant.

“25 million?” said Battelle.

Miller motioned “up” with his hand.

“50 million?”

Miller motioned “up” again.

And so on. Battelle stopped guessing around 100 million. Miller shook his head and said “660 million.” And all the while I was thinking, what the hell are they talking about? My notes actually read: “aol - 660 million what??”

I had a sense of what the number might be, what it could only be. It couldn’t be anything good or the number wouldn’t have been a surprise — AOL would have published it long before.

My suspicion turned out to be correct, as unbelievable as it was. 660 million is the number of AOL CDs the company produced.

The good news is that AOL doesn’t make these CDs any more. I thought Miller stated that they’d stopped sending CDs, but readers immediately reported having received them within the past week. So, I’m not sure whether AOL is still sending them or not.

A stack of 21 bare CDs weigh 335 grams and stands 3cm tall. So, 660 million bare CDs would weigh 10,528,571,428.571 grams (or 23,211,526.7 pounds), and stand 94,285,714.286 cm (or 585.86 miles) tall. This doesn’t include the packaging.

I used to see the AOL CD displays at the post office and wonder if anyone ever takes them. Hasn’t everybody already had one at some point? AOL sent me a half-dozen personally, and two more showed up attached to the newspaper. I believe I may have also seen them inside the 4-pack of toilet cleaner at Costco.

I found a study indicating that as of late 2004 there were 185M Internet users in the US. AOL printed 3.5 CDs for each of them.