Every year Elk Cove welcomes 4-6 Harvest Interns, mostly students of winemaking. Some come from Europe or the Southern Hemisphere to experience an Oregon vintage, others come from just down the road. An essential part of our winemaking team, our interns work long hours during the surge in activity that Harvest brings. We’d like to share a little bit of their stories here:

An interview with 2015 Harvest Intern, Martin:

Where are you from?

Montan, a small town in South Tyrol, Italy

How did you get here?

At our winery Pinot Noir is also the most important variety. I’d heard a lot about Oregon Pinot Noir, found them interesting.

What’s something you’d like people to know about you?

I love wine. I love food. I love soccer and I love ice hockey and music. At my family’s winery, Pfitscher Wines, the whole family works – my father, mother and one brother and one sister. We make about 10,000 cases and the most important is our Pinot Noir. 95% of our wine is sold in Italy, so we don’t have a distributor in the USA – yet. However we built a new winery outside of the town about 5 years ago so we are expanding…

What’s your favorite harvest task & why?

To taste the wines. At that point you know what you’ve worked all year for.

(Martin says that’s cheating, that’s not really a harvest task…)

Also, I like everything. All the jobs.

What’s one of your hidden talents?

Music. I play drums and guitar. I’m better at drums and play in a band called “Space Cadets”.