The first crush of my Year of Winemaking, indeed of my life (excluding my horribly fucked up student wines, which simply don’t count in any meaningful way), was about four tonnes of Lake’s Folly Chardonnay. Together with the excellent winery team, led by Rod Kempe, we processed two press loads of great fruit and then cleaned up.

First point to note here is that all the stories you’ve heard about cleaning at wineries are true. It’s incredibly important and seemingly endless, though when it does end there is often a refreshing beer on hand, which for me, today, was beyond welcome. I’ve already learned to detest the way seeds get stuck in every nook and cranny of processing equipment. To the extent that I have any OCD tendencies, they were certainly exercised today.

As I sit here, feeling pretty tired, a lot of things are swirling around in my head. Three years of University, in many ways, has barely prepared me for work in an actual winery, where process and equipment are of the essence. But it’s fascinating to jump in and out of the physical act of making wine to reflect on the decisions being made. Rod has shared his thinking every step of the way, from his decision to pick, taken late yesterday, to each choice he has made during initial processing of the Chardonnay. His is a deliberate approach borne of twenty five years of experience as well as respect for the heritage of the Estate. I’m soaking it all up.

What’s completely evident to me after only a couple of days here is how much I have to learn, and the distance I have to travel to integrate a lot of (valuable) textbook knowledge with its real world context. For example, Rod and I wandered through the whole vineyard tasting grapes today. I could see his experience shoot through what he was tasting to a decision on which blocks to pick. For me, that sort of knowledge remains to be acquired.

As ever with wine, the industry’s collegiate vibe is a great joy, and I’ve already paid some fascinating visits to Tyrrell’s and Thomas Wines, both fully in the vintage swing. The different choices each winemaker makes, some simply nuances, some quite large, are a source of great fascination for me, even as the experiences out of which they have grown remain opaque. Clearly, though, within the basic parameters of winemaking, there are a multitude of paths one night follow, which adds enormous interest and variability to what is already a highly variable agricultural product. There’s a reason why wine can consume people, both makers and drinkers, and this is part of it.

Tomorrow, we’ll rack the settled Chardonnay juice and get some ferments going, some in tank and some straight into barrel. Should be good.

When one plans a year of travel, getting stuck a day after leaving home isn’t usually on the cards. And yet here I am in the Thora Valley, cut off from the Pacific Highway by several metres of violently flowing river, unable to reach the Hunter Valley. It’s at Lake’s Folly in the Hunter I will start this year of adventure, though the rain has reached it too and picking is delayed.

I’m still surprised to find myself in this position and, in retrospect, I blame a mixup with an exam paper. Around August of 2012, I was ready to sit the final exam of my Masters, primed to smash through it, looking forward to the elation of accomplishment and the reward of junk food. Bathetically, it turned out my exam had been misplaced, and I sat idle in the exam room, exchanging embarrassed glances with the invigilator, for the half hour it took to find my paper.

While I waited, my mind started to wander past a December graduation into the land of “what next?”. I have a good, challenging day job that keeps me busy (as well as fed and watered), but without the structured engagement of University, I had no idea how I’d keep learning about wine growing, aside from simply drinking the finished product. I could always take a year off and follow the harvest around the world, but that would be ridiculous, impractical, not to mention financially ruinous…

And here I am, en route to the Hunter, without income, trapped momentarily by nature, but very much on my way to a year of helping to make wine. So far, the little idea hatched over a misplaced exam paper will take me to Tasmania, the McLaren Vale, Central Otago, Western Australia, California and Germany, perhaps by way of some work in France or thereabouts. I’ll go from a very theoretical view of winemaking to a messily hands-on one, helping a bunch of talented winemakers make lots of different wines in lots of different ways, starting to learn all the things one can’t from books alone.

My wonderful friends wonder if I’ll chuck in the corporate towel and make wine my life once the year is up. I wonder something more essential: how a year of doing this will change my relationship to the drink. For a writer whose currency is a subjective, aesthetic reaction to wine, an immersion in the practicalities of winemaking risks robbing the drink of its mystery. I’m also a scientist by training, though, and know the natural world becomes even more compelling and beautiful with knowledge of how it works. Perhaps the same will happen with wine; as always, I’ll record these experiences and the wine I encounter on Full Pour.

I hope you will keep me company while I find out.