If a person from 1700 asked you your job, would they understand your answer, and if not, how would you explain it to them? - eviltoast
  • yngmnwntr@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    My career hasn’t changed much since the 1700s, I’m a winemaker. Our company doesn’t have a vineyard we buy grapes from farmers, so our winery is in the city not some villa on the hill. At first glance our warehouse full of barrels is pretty similar to an old school winery. I could show my counterpart advances we have made in automation, like our bottling line or the giant industrial press, and I bet they’d get a kick out of moving stacks of barrels or fermentation tanks with a forklift. Using food grade plastic instead of wood makes cleaning easier, and our pump is electric not hand driven, but ultimately little has changed. Our wine lab is pretty high tech and probably the main exception, I dont think they tested for things like acidity and sulfur levels until the industrial revolution. I was literally just talking about this yesterday with my coworker. We had the bottling line out in the yard and we were sanitizing it by pumping boiling water through it with a diesel powered compressor. My contemporary may not understand sanitizing, or the equipment we used to do it, but he would easily understand the bottler and the importance of keeping it clean. I would love to share a few bottles of modern wine with a pre industrial master and vice versa.

    • snooggums@midwest.social
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      9 months ago

      i bet they’d get a kick out of moving stacks of barrels or fermentation tanks with a forklift.

      Yeah, that would be really impressive!

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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            9 months ago

            Medicine might sound a bit too good to be true, yeah, and this was indeed the end of the witch hunting period. Forklifts might be easier to understand, if really awesome, seeing as they had long had foot-powered cranes for really big projects like cathedrals.