Crushing It

SALLY MERTES-STONE OWNS THE GRAPE-STOMP GAME

When Lucille Ball tucked her skirt up into her belt and climbed into a barrel of grapes in 1956, she set the American perception of Italian winemaking back a good century. She also inadvertently jump-started a grape-crushing craze among Americans that largely hasn’t abated.

Machines were already crushing fine Italian grapes in 1956, but the concept of a “team-building exercise” was yet undiscovered. Italian wine’s reputation eventually recovered from Lucy’s pizza-sized feet and the tumble they took in the vat, but it has evidently been the diligence of corporate America that’s kept grape stomping alive and well, particularly in Northern California Wine Country.

Lucy famously reported that stepping on grapes felt like treading on eyeballs, yet somewhere in the North Bay this very weekend, chances are good that folks somewhere will be tendering large stacks of bills for the opportunity to roll up their pants, hike up their skirts and stomp their bare feet all over a vat full of them.

As a sport, grape stomping probably has vigorous health benefits, but almost no one does it long enough to get winded. In competition, one person crushes grapes and their partner “swabs,” or uses their hands to sluice juice into a jug. First duo to fill the jug wins. It’s simple. It’s odd. It’s a career.

Not that Sally Mertes-Stone intended for it to be a career. It just happened that way. The owner of the Grapes & Games event company, based in Sonoma, Mertes-Stone was a flight attendant with a degree in physical education when her husband’s father moved his company to town in 1979.

“He was ahead of his time for liking good wine,” Mertes-Stone laughs over a glass of iced tea at the Sunflower Caffé on the Sonoma Plaza. Having seen the Bay Area during his World War II service, the wise man had always vowed to return. So when it came time to change up the location of his Minnesota telecom company, he moved all his employees and their families to the Sonoma Valley. All of them stayed except his own son, Mertes-Stone’s ex-husband, who eventually left for Florida.

But not before he and Sally had two children and made a life for themselves. The wine industry was just beginning to bud and Mertes- Stone had a savvy girlfriend helping to invent the winery tour business. Could Sally help her? Well, she could help distract the kids while the parents wine tasted, and she could help promote the wineries by hosting “Wine Country Olympics” that included events such as cork tossing. Then, one fine September day when she was at the Vintage Festival’s famous grape stomp, she had an epiphany. She could lead paying customers into vats of “eyeballs” for fun.

“I thought, ‘Hmmm. I could tweak this and make it a more fun corporate thing,’” Mertes-Stone says. “I started having the grape stomp be a part of my Olympic program and it sort of took on a life of its own. People really loved it.”

A trim, vivacious woman of a certain age, Mertes-Stone now puts on more than 50 grape stomps all over the Sonoma Valley each year, lugging vats, hats and grapes with her as she goes.

In the winter, she uses Chilean table grapes; during harvest time she takes unwanted fruit or that damaged by wildfire smoke. No one will be making wine from her grape stomp grapes—or, really, from anyone’s grape stomp. It’s just a bit of innocent fun.