The Bottling Line and The Vineyard: Growing up in Sonoma
Skye Lyons is not new to wine production.
From a young age, Skye worked summers and holidays alongside his father, Stephen Lyons, in the vineyard and on the bottling line at Sonoma’s Ravenswood Winery. Over summers & holidays during college, he did the hard, repetitive, and sometimes boring work of the bottling line. Grit was the only prerequisite.
It always seemed like one of the wines needed to be bottled, each and every week. Skye applied capsules by hand on the line, over and over and over, each day. He had to time everything right, with his hand moving up and down, placing the foil over each bottle. If he missed, the foil would get crushed and he’d have to grab a new one and try to catch up. The repetitive motion caused nightmares! Even Stephen would wake up in the middle of the night and find out his hand was repeating this same motion!
Even though there were always mishaps with bottles dropping to the ground, one great side benefit was that Skye and the bottling crew got to keep bottles from the first and last cases of every bottling. The winery wanted to ensure perfect, sediment-free bottles for their customers, and thanks to this, Skye had access to perfectly good bottles of very expensive single-vineyard Sonoma wines. By the time he was 21, he had the best wine collection of any college kid he knew. In fact, when Sarah met Skye, he still had some amazing bottles left from his college days on the line.
Skye’s memories of the vineyard are consistently fond ones: he loved being out in nature and tending the vines with his dad. For early morning work, Stephen would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on English muffins for the two of them to take with them and eat in the vineyard, where Skye learned the intricacies of pruning, tying, suckering, and finally, harvest.
Just talking to his dad, as they worked side by side in the vines, was magical for Skye. This time together gave Stephen the opportunity to tell stories to Skye about growing up that Skye had never heard before. To this day, both Sarah and Skye crave warm peanut butter & jelly sandwiches for their 4AM breakfast during harvest!