Working in a Winery Has Made Me Question Everything I Thought I Wanted in Life

Could this be the start of something new in the Portuguese countryside?

The Açor mountain range and view from the winery, Dão, Portugal

Every week for six weeks, I asked my husband the same question. Until last week he interned at a winery in the Dão wine-making region of central Portugal. I also spent as much time as I could there as the official intern’s intern.

Every week, I asked him:

Does this experience a) make you want to be a winemaker b) put you off being a winemaker or c) it’s too early to tell?

For six weeks, his answer was c).

The sun is setting as I put out the wine glasses for dinner. A big pot of ragú stands on the stove waiting to be spooned into bowls smelling of the laurel picked from the tree and the tomatoes gifted by a local farmer.

When we sit down to eat, I ask him for the seventh week in a row. Do you want to be a winemaker?

“Yes,” he says. “I want to be a winemaker.”

I never doubted I would eventually hear those words.

We’re outside. The moon is nearly full and illuminates the vines just metres from our table. Small villages on the nearby Açor mountain range twinkle in the darkness.

“Yes,” I say. “I want to be a winemaker too.”

There is a problem however. That admission could signal a big change in our lifestyle — one I am not convinced I am ready to make.

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I’m a city woman. Always have been.

There is a reason we’re not living out our Escape to The Country fantasy. For me, growing up in the countryside felt like growing up in a bucolic prison.

But it’s not easy to be a winemaker in the city. You need grapes and space to vinify them. A garage isn’t going to cut it.

You need the countryside. That terrifies me.

Certainly not because of the job. I love winemaking and I’m delighted to be helping this year.

As the “intern’s intern,” I shovel, I press and I pump. My husband teaches me how to use lab equipment to analyse juice for acidity and potential alcohol levels. Finally I’m putting my high school Chemistry to good use.

Never thought that would happen.

I sort the grapes as workers stronger than me throw boxes onto the sorting table. I jump a little as an inch-long earwig makes its way up my leg.

That’s nothing because the bugs here are everywhere. Angry-looking spiders weave webs between my arm and the sorting table. Flies land on my legs, hoping for a taste of juice. The ants and wasps here are bigger than I’ve ever seen, almost as if they are fortified by unlimited access to fermenting grapes.

You can’t be squeamish here.

By day, this place is a hive of activity. By night, the permanent winery workers leave and my husband and I are the only ones left. We roam the big, rambly winemaking house — his home for a couple of months — surrounded by vines in the centre of Portugal.

At night, we eat, we drink a glass of wine and we talk about how this experience is changing both of us.

And changing us it is.

But I’m not a romantic. The countryside may look cutesy but I know it has teeth.

We hear stories. An acquaintance moved from Canada to Portugal. He rented a house in the heart of winemaking land but didn’t last long.

Few foreigners do in these parts, people tell me.

Another acquaintance swapped New York for a small winemaking region. By and large, she loves it but fitting into what is expected of a woman in her new home has been challenging.

These are tight-knit communities. Will they accept us? Will they accept our weird ideas about how we want to make wine? We don't want to make heavy, soupy, heavily manipulated red wines favoured by the old guard around here but that won’t make us many local friends.

And despite the soft-focus Hollywood-tinged version of winemaking, it isn’t romantic either. Outside of harvest, it can be mind-numbingly boring, filled with just as many administrative duties as any other industry. During harvest, it’s weeks of manual labour with no day off. It’s cleaning. It’s working in the blazing heat.

Innocuous cuts grow into fissures as the acid from the grapes eats away at them. New bruises appear every day and you have no idea where from. Hands turn purple, stained in a way that no amount of scrubbing can improve.

My husband’s hands will take a long time to return to a normal colour

Try to not ingest the sulphur dioxide as it hits the tanks, it’ll make you cough. Try not to die when you step above a tank filled with fermenting juice. Every year we hear stories of carbon dioxide killing winemakers.

Yet despite the stress, pain and exhaustion (and the danger) I’ve never known satisfaction like it. Like every ounce of your being is pulled out of you and bottled with the wine itself.

Wine may be considered a route to early death but in winemaking regions, it’s lifeblood.

But still, I ask. Can I do this? Do I want to do this? Is there a part of me only considering this because my husband has sacrificed so much for me over the last few years?

I told myself that, when we sold our wine store and bar in 2020, it was because we both wanted out. In reality, I think we both know I wanted out more than him.

In the four years since, I became a writer. I love this career more than any other that has come before it. As for my husband, he struggled to find his place in our new life abroad.

Until now.

He has to become a winemaker. But neither he nor I are keen on giving up our city life.

So where do we go from here?

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The harvest party is in full swing. The tiny village is home to Zé’s Pereiras, a drumming association who bangs, shouts and sings well into the night. People open up their gardens as temporary restaurants for hungry harvest workers.

Including us.

Portuguese classics only. Moelas (chicken gizzards). Prego em pão (steak sandwich). Choriço made from local pigs and cured in a basement not ten metres from where we sit.

It’s days like this I think I could do this. I could live in the countryside. The days when community come together. The days when the DJ gives you a hug because you reply to his “eu adoro techno” (I love techno) with “eu tambem!” (Me too!)

A techno-loving 50+ year-old Portuguese DJ? Who says countryside living is boring?

It’s also days like this that remind me about what living out here can do for you.

I spend so much of my life plugged in. It’s my job to know what is happening out there and to make sense of it through the articles I write.

But when you barely have Wi-Fi, AI concerns feel a long way away. When your fingernails are black underneath with grape skins and all you care about is your evening shower — any soap will do — five-step skincare regimes and weekly manicures feel unreal.

The wider world affects everyone, regardless of how out-in-the-sticks you are. But when your world shrinks into something as single-minded as winemaking — when you spend your days working, your evenings eating, and your nights listening to the owls — the outside world feels other-worldly.

And that makes me sleep more soundly than I have in years.

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I leave my role as the intern’s intern to return to the city. To my actual life. It’s only Monday and yet the streets are thronged with people as I alight the train. I turn the light on in my one-bedroomed apartment, illuminating it in all its 500-square-foot glory.

If this was a Hallmark movie, turning this light on would be my lightbulb moment, when I realise that city life isn’t for me anymore. I would step onto my balcony to a cacophony of noise and grime. I would hear the local character aggressively shouting at passers by. It would be enough to make me hot-foot it back to my husband to declare:

Let’s do this! Let’s give up our shallow city life, don Blundstone boots and flannels and live forevermore in contented rural bliss!

But this isn’t a movie. There are no cut-and-dry narratives here. I love the noise. And the local character is neither aggressive nor shouty — we exchange daily bom dias.

Perhaps if we were rich, we could have it all. A pied à terre in the city, a house, winery and vineyard in the country. We could bundle our belongings in the back of our charmingly battered pickup truck whenever we need — or want — to spend time in the country. We could “summer” in our winemaking house and stay there throughout the harvesting season.

But that is as fantastical as my Hallmark-tinged come-to-Jesus moment

Instead, I’m in no-mans land. One foot in the winemaking dream, the other in the city, both parts feeding my personality.

Only time will tell if we exchange city life for the winemaking in the countryside but one thing is for sure:

I’ve already got the Blundstone boots and the flannels.

Perhaps there is a reason I bought them in the first place.