Winemaking can be a perilous game.
If two deaths two days apart last month (a 78 year old in Rias Baixas and a 76 year old in Saint-Mortan, in the Côtes du Vivarais) did anything other than leave two families heartbroken – the latter was found, heartwrenchingly, by his son – they also serve as a reminder that wineries are incredibly dangerous places to work.
The prime cause of death – or, at least, the one that gets the most attention in the press – is carbon dioxide (CO2) asphyxiation. The two men mentioned above succumbed to this and it is a well-known killer, primarily during harvest season when fermenting vats give off highly dangerous levels of the gas.
Indeed, at a medium-sized winery in which I worked, the winery's head office decided to send down two health and safety managers to monitor potentially dangerous aspects of harvest work. One evening, with the three sliding barn doors open to the night air in the main cellar, they still found the concentration of CO2 at the back of the cellar to be well above safe working limits. The winery had been in operation for more than 35 years.
Most cellarworkers will have likely found the perceived level of carbon dioxide in that space well within the norms of their experience: not to be taken lightly, but nothing immediately alarming. Having worked for years as a cellarhand, alarming levels of CO2 generally manifest as being choked without being physically throttled – the effect comes on remarkably quickly. An additional, perhaps more alarming, sign is that, even when holding one's breath, one's vision begins to swim.
Some are more alert to it than others. One French winemaker's cigarette habit likely saved his life after he found that he couldn't light up in the cellar – the carbon dioxide concentration was so high, the flame would not ignite. He got out.
A Canadian wine industry safety pamphlet published in 2020 pointed out that "Breathing carbon dioxide at concentrations greater than 10 percent can produce unconsciousness in less than one minute and, failing rescue, death".
The additional problem – aside from the flirtation with terminal levels of danger – is also probably apparent in my recounting of this. There is a culture of indirect bragging around dangers workers face in wineries. Want to break the ice with a new group of interns in the cellar? Ask them about the dangers they've experienced or seen or heard about.
Such "bragging" is predominantly found among seasonal cellarhands, but certainly carries through to all levels of winery staff.
Interestingly – perhaps because of both its ubiquity and its invisibility, near-misses involving carbon dioxide are the least recountable among the anecdotes of cellar dangers. Here, we enter the realm of the physical and wineries are a perfect storm of potential hazards: gases (asphyxiation, choking, asthma), high levels of water and moisture (slips, falls), working from heights (slips, falls), machinery (blunt-force trauma, electrocution) and the big one: confined spaces (slips, falls, asphyxiation). Almost everything requiring cleaning, maintainence or use in a winery is a confined space.
From harvest gondolas to tipping bins, presses, tanks, vats, cellars: nine times out of 10, someone is going in them at least once a year – often much more. Confined spaces, trip hazards, spill hazards, water and electricity, working in low-light conditions, toxic gases – combine all that with often long hours, complacency (veteran staff) and bravado (younger cellarhands) and the capacity for accidents widens.
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