Diary of a Napa harvest intern – part 6

Barrels in a Napa Valley cave 2020

In her penultimate despatch Samantha Cole-Johnson is considering her next move, and the impact of different barrels.

This vintage is pressed off and in barrel, one of our interns has left, and every FYB has been washed, dried, stacked, and stored behind burnished crush equipment at the back of the cave.

Picking bins washed and stacked in a Napa Valley winery awaiting the 2021 harvest

The other remaining intern and I exchange notes on job postings daily. For both of us, choosing a life of seasonal work in pursuit of education and travel didn’t seem like much of a gamble last year. Now we’re contending with a shrunken economy, travel as an impossibility (no...