"I was a recipient of the Jimmy Mancbach Scholarship this year and I want to let you know about my experience and thank you for making it possible. I did my harvest at Hanzell Vineyards in Sonoma. Although the fires and COVID-19 have made it a uniquely challenging experience, I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent there. I arrived at the winery in late July and after a brief period of isolation, I joined everybody on the bottling line for a week. Once we were done with bottling, we started preparing for harvest by cleaning and sanitizing the winery, walking through the vineyards, and collecting and testing the fruit. Walking through vineyards is one of my favorite jobs and I even got to visit the off-premises vineyards with the winemaker, McNeill. The estate fruit was ready earlier than expected which turned out to be a bit of a good thing as the fires started near the end of everything getting picked. Most of the time I was on the sorting table picking out leaves and grass from the fruit. We had some long days sorting but there was always good conversation and good music which made it seem shorter. Once harvest began we did punch-downs on all the red wine several times throughout the day. When the wine started fermenting the punch-downs would release bubbles which made the tanks look kind of like bright pink bubble baths. The color of fresh wine can be really beautiful. Pressing the reds went by fast and soon enough all the fermentations were finishing. After that, there wasn't much left to do besides cleaning everything up and storing it for next year. I'm really glad that I got to work at such a historic winery and be involved in so many parts of the winemaking process. Everyone that worked there was so friendly and inviting and I'm so grateful for all of them. Thank you for helping to provide this scholarship. It has really been one of the best experiences of my life and will help me so much in my future career and I owe it to you."