Mongolian Winemakers

(posted by Chris) i had a very unique experience at the winery on saturday…

We bottled two barrels of Cabernet Saturday that we put together for a group of friends, sort of a very small lot custom-crush deal, and at the tail end of bottling the cabernet, a group of 4 walked into the winery, seemingly to do some wine tasting. they were of asian descent. there were 2 older people, and 2 younger people…parents and sons. they walked up to me at the tasting bar and one of the sons started talking to me in a broken, soft spoken english. he explained that his father had just started a winery in MONGOLIA!! yes, MONGOLIA!! and was interested in our practices in the winery. they wanted to know if we would show them our winemaking equipment and talk with them about the winemaking process. so, i obliged…

first we went back to the crusher/destemmer and i explained the function and how we used it. they asked me some basic questions regarding the crusher through their son translating. and they would talk among themselves, mother and father, for a bit and ask more questions. then we went to the horizontal rotary bladder press and again, same thing, more questions, talking among themselves, etc.

they asked if there was somewhere locally that they could get a press and a crusher/destemmer and i said that ours was specialized equipment and was special order only. and they asked if there was a place where they could buy supplies, so i sent them to napa fermentation supplies.

and then toward the end, they discovered our little 3 nozzle syphon bottler…they went CRAZY for this…lots and lots and lots of talk between them. all this time, they had a sony digital camera and they were taking pictures and doing videos of all the equipment and the winery. they asked if we were “making wine today”…i told them, no, we only make wine once a year during crush, but that we were bottling today. so, finally they tasted some wine and bought a couple of bottles and left, seemingly happily…they taught me to say “you’re welcome” in mongolian…

fascinating, if odd and weird experience…

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Day To Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.