HELPING HANDS
Steuben Arc/ Pleasant Valley Winery team for sparkling holiday
By ROB PRICE THE COURIER-ADVOCATE

PHOTO BY ROB PRICE Clients of Steuben Arc stuff and seal cases of champagne at the Pleasant Valley Winery. The organization is helping the winery prepare holiday gift packs of the bubbley.

HAMMONDSPORT - Cases of Great Western champagne are filling the warehouse of Pleasant Valley Winery, bound for bubbly holidays across the country. Each case is packed with 12 bottles of champagne and six packets of confetti for seasonal celebrations.

The bottles are packed by Pleasant Valley employees; the confetti is an embellishment courtesy of Steuben Arc, whose clients have been working on the winery's production line for weeks now, providing additional manpower during the holiday crunch.

Arc began helping out at Pleasant Valley Winery years ago, according to winery owner Michael Doyle. In the past, however, Arc clients could work at a gentler pace, forming their own production lines and counting out the bags of confetti on their own schedule.

This year, the winery faces a crunch, as the confetti bags didn't arrive until the annual grape harvest and pressing. "We usually do the confetti earlier in the year," Doyle said Thursday. "We don't have that luxury now."

Faced with the crunch, Arc clients have been staffing the tail end of the production line in two daily shifts. As Beverly Dillon, an Arc production supervisor, stamps each case, an Arc client counts out six bags of confetti and drops the bags into each case.

"It's a fast pace," Dillon said. "It's a challenge for us."

It's a challenge the Arc clients are meeting, too. "These guys are doing a real good job," said Alan Laffler, a Pleasant Valley employee who has been sharing the line assignment.

Case after case of champagne rolls into the warehouse, and Laffler estimates the production system has been kicking out about 675 cases a day. That's nearly 3,000 cases over the past four weeks and 18,000 bags of confetti. As Doyle notes, the Arc clients must be responsible for keeping up with the speed of the mechanized bottling system on the other side of the wall. "Now the speed of the line is dictating how fast they're going," he said.

And it's working, Doyle added. "They're great folks, and they love being here," he said.