Every task has its tools. Climbers come with ropes. Doctors have their stethoscopes. Builders require many tools, while a writer can get by with just a pencil. We who work with wine rely heavily on our hands, but there are a few tools that help us get the job done. Some of us carry a utility knife - what Daniel calls the ‘slice-and-dice’. I tend to use my house keys to open and break down boxes; they are lighter than the knife and always in my pocket. Conscientious stockers use a marker when stacking in the storeroom to indicate which wines lie unseen behind the outer box. This written record of hidden boxes ensures the hunt for bottles involves more looking than lifting. So far we’ve got two tools: a fat Sharpie, and something sharp.

The third and final indispensable wine stocking tool is the hand truck, a two-wheeled vertical dolly with a toe-plate, which, properly wielded, can increase one’s lifting power fourfold and turn a back-breaking pile of boxes into a breeze. There’s a T-shirt from a weight lifting gym that could be an Oakland Yard shirt: it reads, “I lift things up and put them down again.” We receive between fifty and a hundred cases most Tuesdays, each weighing about thirty-six pounds, so the full load is somewhere between three thousand and five thousand pounds. We have to pick them all up and put them down again, with or without the truck, all two tons of them, but the hand truck means we don’t have to carry them far, and we can put them away four times as quickly. This tool has been around for a while, invented in the 4th millennium BC in Lower Mesopotamia, when the Sumerians inserted rotating axles into solid discs of wood.

At Oakland Yard, we kept our first hand truck for five and a half years, but one day last month our dolly disappeared. We looked in every corner. The truck’s not small and we haven’t many corners. Maybe Liv borrowed it for a gardening project? Or we lent it to Tacos Oscar? But it wasn’t Liv. And Oscar said no, adding that their hand truck recently went missing as well. Who steals a hand truck from the wine shop? Or two trucks from the same block? It will turn up, we thought, while carrying boxes one by one around the store, until last week, when we gave up, and Daniel went to the hardware store for a new hand truck.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all is right with the world, and I’m still mystified by the missing hand trucks, but I am relieved to return to work with all of my trusted tools. If you drop by the Yard this week for a glass or a bottle, we won’t put you to work, but please bring the tools we’re all accustomed to - your mask, vax proof, and shirt and shoes - and also bring a thirst, for wine and laughter, a thirst for sharing all the love and sadness life throws at you, a thirst for time together, because time is all we really have, and together is the best way to spend it.

Cheers,

Max

p.s. Don’t forget to register your online vote for OAKLAND YARD... for Oakland Magazine’s people’s choice Best of Oakland awards. We’re the very last category in the Food & Drink section, and the polls close on May 31st at 11:00pm Pacific Time! Click HERE to VOTE!