Sustainability, Grey Water and Having a Laugh….

Sustainability, Grey Water and Having a Laugh Sustainability is, of course, a serious topic but it doesn’t mean we can’t have a laugh, so we thought we’d share one. An amusing statistic about wine production is how many litres of water we use – for every litre of wine we produce, we use roughly two litres of water. We hasten to add this is not water that finds its way into Moss Wood wine. Definitely not! However, we use large volumes of water for the cleaning work that a safe and relatively sterile environment requires.
All our basic wash-down water, used primarily for cleaning floors, is filtered from our spring-fed dam. Any water used for cleaning surfaces that come in contact with juice and wine are washed down with sterile-filtered rainwater.
In the name of sustainability and caring for the environment, the subsequent “grey” water is captured in holding tanks, the solids are settled (and eventually removed to be used in commercial mulch) and then it is pumped away to irrigate the winery compost. The system is generally easy to operate and fuss free and keeps our grey water out of the local creeks. While it is not toxic in any way, the sedimentation tanks can get a bit smelly and this will cause a nuisance if our main pump breaks down, as it recently did.
To solve the problem, the tanks were drained, leaving an ankle-deep residue on the bottom and then the recalcitrant submersible pump was retrieved and examined. The lucky tradie assigned to the job, let’s call him Gus, checked the pump, concluded that it seemed to be OK, returned it to the tank and leaned over the top to watch it operating again. Unfortunately, his brand new wallet dropped out of his top pocket and plopped into the smelly remnants at the bottom of the tank. Typically this is the fate of mobile phones, but not on this day. Needless to say, this led to a stream of profanities, only slightly less in volume than Keith’s laughter. Gus tried desperately to retrieve said wallet using a length of fencing wire, but to no avail. There was no choice – he had to get a ladder and climb down to fetch it. This was done absolutely according to confined space entry but there was a small problem. When he got to the bottom, he slipped! More profanity and more laughter followed but he safely exited the tank, with the wallet but let’s just say, he didn’t come up smelling of roses.