Slave to the vine: New book offers dirty details of wine cellar work

Vines heavy with ripe clusters, bins of berries and tanks full of fermenting juice — if harvest season has you itching for a peek behind the grape curtain, Darren Delmore’s new memoir dishes all the dirty details.

“Slave to the Vine: Confessions of a Vagabond Cellar Hand” recounts Delmore’s time working crush at a remote vineyard on the Sonoma Coast — a wild ride fueled by wine, weed and women.

Battling a crippling, chronic stomach ailment, swarms of yellow jackets and a gruff, exacting boss, Delmore shed blood, sweat and tears working as a cellar hand for the famed Hirsch Vineyards, exorcising the demons of a failed marriage as well as the digestive disorder.

Delmore, now national sales director for Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles and married with two young children, provides an up-close look at the grueling and monotonous work of crush, as well as an impressive roster of wines consumed during the process.

With wry humor and vivid anecdotes, Delmore — son of the couple behind Del’s Pizzeria in Shell Beach — doesn’t hold back the gory details: cursing at inanimate objects, almost quitting more than once, flashes of just driving off the winery’s rugged ridge.

But ultimately it’s a story of redemption and finding a new road forward, much like another local author’s tale of working harvest at a remote vineyard, Sean Christopher Weir’s “The Mad Crush: A Memoir of Mythic Vines and Improbable Winemaking.”

“As intense and low paying as this temporary gig happened to be, the healing was priceless,” Delmore writes. “It was clear that home is where the heartburn is, and what I needed more than pills and endoscopies was to spread my wings and leave the past behind.”

“Slave to the Vine” is available for purchase online at www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoblecom.

This story was originally published September 2, 2016 at 3:12 PM with the headline "Slave to the vine: New book offers dirty details of wine cellar work."