The Fizz #60: Lauren June thrives in the technical parts of winemaking
Lauren and I speak about what it means to work in the cellar, how technical sparkling wine production actually is, and what a great harvest internship looks like.
Before we jump into The Fizz, I want to say thanks to everyone subscribing. As many of you know, it’s harvest season, and this year I’m managing two vineyards by myself. Getting new Fizz issues (Fizzes?) out has been a little more tricky than usual. Thanks for hanging around.
For the 60th issue of The Fizz, I spoke to Lauren June, cellar hand at Cruse Wine Co. Lauren works with Michael Cruse at his eponymous winery, making grapes into incredible still and sparkling wines. From disgorging to riddling to sampling, Lauren’s passion is in the cellar, getting technical and hands-on in the winemaking process. Lauren’s hardworking ethos, curiosity, and craftsmanship shines in this interview. I’m so excited to see more from this dedicated person in our industry.
In this issue, we speak about the day to day of what it means to actually do full time cellar work in a winery. We touch on what a great harvest internship looks like, what new wine industry folks should look for in an internship, and how her time at Hirsch helped her find her way to Cruse. We talk through the not-so-glamourous parts of winemaking, and why those are the ones she finds most romantic. If you’ve wanted to work in the cellar, this is the issue for you.
Margot: Can you give me a sense of how you got started in the wine industry? What brought you here?
Lauren: I actually changed careers just three years ago, so I’m still relatively new as it goes. I spent almost thirteen years in the music business actually. At first, I was doing concert venue booking and promotion, and then that moved into festivals. I was working for a promoter that did pretty large scale festivals in the Bay Area. It was amazing. I loved it, but I think there's just a certain point where you see that industry changing, probably not completely unlike how certain aspects of the wine industry are changing in terms of corporate colonization. Giant corporate promoters buying up small venues and small businesses trying to compete with that, feeling very burnt out on trying to keep our heads above water.
It’s one of those things where people say to be careful monetizing your passions or whatever, and there I was starting to hate going to shows. I had always been super fascinated by wine but didn't have the time to really dig into it the way I wanted to. I thought, okay, I'll take a break from music and just dip my toe into the wine industry and see if it sticks. Luckily, I found everyone to be really helpful and open and welcoming.
I just put my head down and started reaching out to people, volunteering. I volunteered at Battonage, which is a women in wine industry event and just asked a million questions and people gave me a ton of contacts and connections. It just all happened very fast. I was really lucky to meet good people who were willing to help me.
Margot: That's awesome. You had a great initial community experience.
Lauren: Yeah. That was the very beginning of it. Then I went on a trip to Europe for a little over a month. The biggest advice I got when talking to people—everybody told me maybe you think you want to go into marketing, which is what I figured I would do, since that’s what I had done int he music industry. But they said just work a harvest because no matter what you end up doing, you will learn so much more about what you're selling. There's all these people that have been selling wine for decades and have never set foot in the cellar and have like zero understanding of actual production.
I thought that makes a lot of sense and it sounds terrifying and fun. [laughs] It was already late May by the time I really started thinking about it, which is kind of late in terms of trying to find an internship. I just started throwing my resume out kind of cold, also answering some online ads.
I was a big fan of Michael [Cruse]'s wines and I had emailed him, but they were actually all set not surprisingly, but they unbeknownst to me passed my resume on to Jasmine at Hirsch Vineyards who needed some more help last minute. I was on my way to Europe, like boarding a flight to London, and got an email from Jasmine to come do my first harvest with them. I had to wait ten hours on the flight just freaking out before I could respond. It was very bizarre, but it all happened really fast and really in a cool, organic way.
That was my first job in the industry was the 2019 harvest at Hirsch.
Margot: What was that experience like? What did you do during that internship?
Lauren: I got to live on the property, which was pretty amazing because it is one of the most unique and striking and kind of extreme vineyard sites I've ever seen. It's basically the top of the Sonoma Coast, one of the highest vineyards. I was living in a little housing in the middle of the vineyards and just did everything while having no experience, which I was super open about. But I was used to getting dirty. I've done festival production. I'm a horse girl. So like, throw it at me.
I definitely did a lot of cleaning to start because I didn't even know what a valve was, or a pump or anything. It was cleaning drains and all the not glamorous stuff at first, but then they were really good about training me up fast. I got to spend the first couple of weeks sampling the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vineyards in the morning, which was unreal—scooting down on my butt because the Chardonnay blocks are so steep and it was dewey and slippery. It was pretty wild.
Then learning all about fermentation. I had read about punch downs and pump overs, but until you're doing one, it's like a whole book kind of came to life, which was really cool. I definitely barreled down that entire vintage—a lot of podcast time [laughs]. They just really threw me in there and were really supportive, answered all my dumb questions. I found that I loved production.
Margot: What does it mean to have a good harvest internship experience? A lot of folks right now are going through their first harvest internships or considering where to reach out for next year. What advice would you have for them or, or what does a good harvest experience look like for you?
Lauren: For me personally, I'm definitely a little bit of a Jack of all trades master of none personality—I like to have my hands in everything. I would've taken probably any internship, and at that point I couldn't have been too picky. I really lucked out with where I ended up, but I think I wanted to work for a small to medium size producer just because I figured I wouldn't be pigeonholed into one position. I have a lot of friends who did internships in Australia and worked for huge wineries and all they did was dig outs and sanitized giant tanks all day, every day. They got trained on one thing and that’s what they did all day.
That's absolutely a valuable experience, but definitely more limited in scope. I wanted to get in somewhere where I was able to actually interact with the winemaker. Get to talk to them, get to learn about their philosophy and be pretty involved in every aspect of the vintage, which certainly was my experience at Hirsch because it's such a small team. Where I work now is similarly quite small. But honestly I think someone gave me great advice and just said whatever internship you end up taking, you'll either learn what you hate about that type of winery or what you love about it and it'll be valuable regardless.
I think it's cool to reach out to someone that you actually admire where you like what they produce, but I don't think that that's critical, especially for your first internship. Just get some experience and then it'll make it all that much easier to go to the person you want work with.
Margot: How did you end up working with Michael?
I ended up getting to know him just during that vintage at Hirsch. He has a pretty close working relationship with them. I just saw him time to time, and I guess I didn't do a terrible job at Hirsch because when I was finishing up there in late October, they mentioned Michael's harvest was going long. Two of his interns had to leave. They were from out of town. The day I finished at Hirsch, I don't think he even gave me 24 hours. I got an email from him at like midnight or something, saying hey, you probably never want to see grapes again, but I could use six weeks of help just to finish out my harvest.
I was like, oh God, but yes, yes, I'll do it. I had a few days off. I think I was going to Mexico. I told him I can start in five days. So I had a mini break and then I jumped right back in. They were still getting a little bit of fruit, which I was very surprised about. I thought that release would've been done, and so I finished that out and when we were done with harvest, he mentioned they could use a little help disgorging. That's our year round biggest work. I said cool. I'd like to see that, so I'll stick around to the end of the year.
Then at the end of the year, he asked me to stay, and that's where I am now. I've been with him almost three years now.
Margot: That’s so great. Can you talk about what you do in the cellar?
Lauren: I am the only full-time cellar hand here, but everybody's in the cellar to some degree. Our oenologist is also in the cellar as well as our cellar master and assistant winemaker. There are four of us regularly working in the cellar. We're doing everything from sampling and analysis to topping and racking and bottling. There’s a lot of work that goes on throughout the year, even with still wines. With the sparkling wines, we make a pretty high volume and that means that throughout the year, even a little bit during harvest, we are nonstop riddling.
We have a building called Bubble Town and it's full of our bins. It’s a bunch of vintages of wines that are sitting on lees for several years, depending on what they are. We're waking those up and riddling them and disgorging them. That’s a lot of what we’re doing now.
Margot: Cool. What is the process for that? Are you using gyropallets?
Lauren: Luckily I came when we had the gyropallets, but Michael used to riddle everything by hand, and we still do have a bunch of riddling racks, which we still use if we're just throwing twelve bottles on to do a trial.
We do hand riddle if we have a few bottles that won't fit in one of the cages and we don't have anything else to put in. I just hand riddled right now, there's always something, which is really cool. It's so wild that that's still someone's full time job in some places. I think that's fascinating.
We have to take all the wines out of the tirage bins, which we build, which is another thing I learned—how to build bins, never used power tools in my life before I learned that. There are wine movements all the time. One of those is taking wines from tirage into riddling. That can be like a full day of work. It's really rhythmic and quiet and those days are nice because they give me some alone time, quiet time.
Margot: I’m sure it gets very meditative. Do you all do any experiments in the cellar? Do you work pretty closely with Michael?
Lauren: Pretty closely. He's super involved and really generous with his knowledge. He was a chemist by trade before he was in wine, so he's always willing to expand upon a particular process that I’m interested in. I take a lot of notes.
Specific gravity and pressure and sparkling wines and all of these things—sparkling is such a different beast than still wine is. There's so many more layers of precision and timing. I think that's been one of the most rewarding parts of working here is getting the opportunity to learn all of that.
As far as experiments go, we make traditional method sparkling wine and we also do pet-nat. One of the things that drew me to Michael is his use of less traditional varieties. We're doing a pet-nat of St. Laurent. And I love Petit Syrah and my first vintage with him, he bottled Petit Syrah on its own. That was really exciting for me to be involved with, and that wasn't something he'd done before. He's just an experimental person in that way. His philosophy is to take California wine and do it kind of a different way.
Margot: What should people know about making sparkling wine? What's something you learned about the process?
Lauren: I've learned really to respect pressure. Everything is so alive. I never thought about it, but there is your typical pressure for a sparkling wine—between five and seven atmospheric units of pressure, which is around 15 psi. If you think about that, you've got far more pressure than your car tire in a little bottle. You have to have the right glass that can maintain that type of pressure. I could have seen myself saying oh, I'll just make a pet-nat and put it in just some light American glass and not think about it. And then, boom. I'm always amazed that things don't explode more than they do, because sometimes there'll be a little fault in the glass and you get a preview of what could happen if you did it wrong.
As the fermentations are going along, you’re really watching for that exact moment when you want to bottle, especially with the pet-nat. That means constantly measuring brix and specific gravity. Those are the things that we're monitoring in the cellar. If you're doing traditional method, you have to decide how much sugar you're going to add to reach your desired pressure.
I would not say that making still wines is at all easy or uncomplicated, but take that and then layer on so much for sparkling wine. Training your palate to be as familiar as possible with that wine, so you can more easily see how it can be affected by these little changes that you can make—that’s important and really cool.
With hand disgorging, it has been great to learn from Michael. It's not an easy process. Now we have a doseuse, which disgorges for us. Most of the time we can't use it for absolutely everything, and you still have to hand feed the bottles and be very careful. With hand disgorging, the timing and angle has to be precise—that's not something you can just learn in a book.
Margot: It’s all about the gesture! I love that. What brings you joy in your work? What’s a part of the process that you really love and what’s something that’s not as enjoyable for you?
Lauren: I always whine about topping—they call it the angel’s share. It’s so important but I just find it so arduous. You have to fill the barrels up so that the wine doesn’t oxidize basically. It can be just a few mLs of wine in each barrel, but it’s really important to keep the wine healthy and fresh. You’re climbing up ladders and going to every single barrel. When you have to break down a barrel into kegs or whatever, I'm like ugh. Once I'm doing it, I kind of enjoy it, but if you hand me a topping work order, you're going to at least see my eyes roll.
I prefer sampling if I have to climb barrels, but with less equipment. We like pull samples and do analysis on our line—that's something I really do enjoy. Just checking in on the wines and smelling them. I think that's really nice, spending time with the wines in the cellar.
I think the equipment's just endlessly fascinating, especially during harvest. It's really satisfying to make a setup for a slightly complicated drain or something, where you have to connect a bunch of pieces together. You're using your clamps and your valves and connecting things and using reducers. I really enjoy that mechanical part of your brain that you have to learn to turn on. If something broke, I used to kind of look around and ask, can anybody fix this for me? Now my instinct is to grab the nail gun and try and fix it myself. That’s a really big change for me and something I really enjoy.
Margot: That's a really interesting point. I think that a lot of folks thinking about winemaking don't consider the technology side of it. How to figure out barrels and tanks and valves and screws and drainage and all that fun stuff. It sounds like problem solving is something that interests you in your role.
Lauren: For sure, absolutely. Trying to do things efficiently and safely, quickly, in the right way is cool to think through. I learned a lot about sanitizing things—also not something I'd ever done before. That definitely is a part of it that I got hooked on pretty fast.
That's the not glamorous part of it, but it kind of is! I find it romantic, I guess it's not glamorous because we're always dirty and bruised, it is hard on your body. That's for sure. But you're also getting really strong. It is a lot of time spent like cleaning things, even when you're not an intern, we're always cleaning, gotta clean the floors and clean the tank. Only when we have interns, do we have any extra help.
Margot: You’re still pretty new in the wine industry—what's something about it that surprised you?
Lauren: The legal aspect. The sales side of it is something that I didn't understand. Specifically, the distribution system, the three tiered system. I help out a lot with the direct to consumer side of things. I somewhat understood that process and the release cycle and how shipping through a third party sometimes works. I mean, we send all our orders out ourselves here. That was really interesting to me, dealing with putting together wholesale orders and having a distributor in every single state and any country you're sending stuff to.
Everyone has a different process. As a consumer, you don't really realize how complicated the laws are in the country. It can be antiquated and frustrating, difficult, and it's expensive. You have to get licensed in every state to ship direct to consumer.
If you were a smaller producer, I now understand why people don't ship to certain states. It’s very expensive and maybe not worth it for their sales. I don't think our government makes it very easy to sell wine in that way.
Margot: That is such an important aspect of the industry that definitely goes under the radar for consumers. It’s our back of house, in a way. I’m curious about your future—are you super happy in the cellar and this is where you find your joy? Are you looking to make your own wine at some point?
Lauren: I have realized that no matter what I end up doing, I do want to have some arm in production, whether it is doing something else or making a bit of my own wine. People do sort of feel a pressure to make their own wine. I know a lot of people who feel like that—like now I know what I’m doing so I better make my own wine. I admire people who jump and do that.
It works for me in the cellar because I double check everything. I do want to make my own wine, but I am making sure it's for the right reasons with the right fruit at the right time, I can talk to the right grower. I think it is amazing to do that and I would love to, but I'm also really loving concentrating on learning everything I can here. The more experience I have, the better whatever I produce will be anyway.
Margot: I think that’s such an incredible point. So often people who work in wineries are asked that question, right? When are you gonna do your own thing? It's such an ego thing of like, I need my own wine, my own thing. It can really be a weird capitalist way of thinking—when are you gonna make your own product to sell?
Lauren: Right, exactly. And I am by no means above having those moments where I'm like, what am I doing if I'm not putting my own stuff out in the world? I don't fully know if that urge would ever go away. I don't just want to do it because I feel this pressure, whether it's internal or external. I feel very fortunate to be doing what I'm doing and to be learning and I'm not going to drop that just to go off and design my own labels or whatever. Not that I don't do that for fun [laughs].
Margot: I love that. What would you say to folks who are interested in getting into the industry?
Lauren: Talk to everyone you can. People were so helpful. That was something that I found very different about the wine industry. I was talking to smaller producers and a community of people that I think were somewhat like minded. Definitely a lot of people in the natural wine realm. I didn't not like big corporate wine folks, but I felt like at a smaller level, everyone was willing to help and answer questions and put me in touch with people that I could talk to.
Work a harvest, because I think it was really intimidating for me. I did not know what I was getting myself into. I made the mistake of reading articles of people's experiences and it was like, oh God, this sounds awful, but it was actually super incredible. I think even if you absolutely hate it, you would still get so much out of it. I definitely have seen people who absolutely hated it. You have to just give into it and call it an experience. It's long hours and it's exhausting—it reminded me a lot of festival times where you don't sleep, you're dirty, cranky, tired, but at the end of it, you're like, look, I produced this thing and it's incredible. Everyone's enjoying it now and look what I did. You have to just keep remembering that.
Margot: Excellent advice. Thank you, Lauren! Excited to drink more Cruse wines this year.
You can support Lauren by following her on Instagram and staying in touch with her next moves.
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