Winemaking can be a perilous game.

If two deaths two days apart last month (a 78 year old in Rias Baixas and a 76 year old in Saint-Mortan, in the Côtes du Vivarais) did anything other than leave two families heartbroken – the latter was found, heartwrenchingly, by his son – they also serve as a reminder that wineries are incredibly dangerous places to work.

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The prime cause of death – or, at least, the one that gets the most attention in the press – is carbon dioxide (CO2) asphyxiation. The two men mentioned above succumbed to this and it is a well-known killer, primarily during harvest season when fermenting vats give off highly dangerous levels of the gas.

Indeed, at a medium-sized winery in which I worked, the winery's head office decided to send down two health and safety managers to monitor potentially dangerous aspects of harvest work. One evening, with the three sliding barn doors open to the night air in the main cellar, they still found the concentration of CO2 at the back of the cellar to be well above safe working limits. The winery had been in operation for more than 35 years.

Most cellarworkers will have likely found the perceived level of carbon dioxide in that space well within the norms of their experience: not to be taken lightly, but nothing immediately alarming. Having worked for years as a cellarhand, alarming levels of CO2 generally manifest as being choked without being physically throttled – the effect comes on remarkably quickly. An additional, perhaps more alarming, sign is that, even when holding one's breath, one's vision begins to swim.

Some are more alert to it than others. One French winemaker's cigarette habit likely saved his life after he found that he couldn't light up in the cellar – the carbon dioxide concentration was so high, the flame would not ignite. He got out.

A Canadian wine industry safety pamphlet published in 2020 pointed out that "Breathing carbon dioxide at concentrations greater than 10 percent can produce unconsciousness in less than one minute and, failing rescue, death".

The additional problem – aside from the flirtation with terminal levels of danger – is also probably apparent in my recounting of this. There is a culture of indirect bragging around dangers workers face in wineries. Want to break the ice with a new group of interns in the cellar? Ask them about the dangers they've experienced or seen or heard about.

Such "bragging" is predominantly found among seasonal cellarhands, but certainly carries through to all levels of winery staff.

Interestingly – perhaps because of both its ubiquity and its invisibility, near-misses involving carbon dioxide are the least recountable among the anecdotes of cellar dangers. Here, we enter the realm of the physical and wineries are a perfect storm of potential hazards: gases (asphyxiation, choking, asthma), high levels of water and moisture (slips, falls), working from heights (slips, falls), machinery (blunt-force trauma, electrocution) and the big one: confined spaces (slips, falls, asphyxiation). Almost everything requiring cleaning, maintainence or use in a winery is a confined space.

From harvest gondolas to tipping bins, presses, tanks, vats, cellars: nine times out of 10, someone is going in them at least once a year – often much more. Confined spaces, trip hazards, spill hazards, water and electricity, working in low-light conditions, toxic gases – combine all that with often long hours, complacency (veteran staff) and bravado (younger cellarhands) and the capacity for accidents widens.

I've seen an old Spanish farmer fall in a huge grape-collection gondola, I've seen an Italian cellarhand fall in a vat of fermenting Pinot Noir, I've seen a French woman crouch to tie a shoelace and get hit by a reversing forklift; I've crushed my finger trying to hammer loose a hex nut on a press, I've had the ladder I was on slide away from under me on a wet floor, I've sliced my thumb open trying to wrestle a three-inch must hose back into a tank, I've fallen over (both in the vineyard and in the winery) more times than I can possibly recall. I could write a book on what I've seen and – more terrifyingly – what I've heard.

(A particular "favorite" is one of my former colleagues in France telling me about the day another fellow worker decided to remove a section of steel grating on a walkway by the grape receival area – the colleague walked past carrying a bucket and fell through the hole in the walkway, landing one storey below on the concrete floor, fracturing his pelvis.)

Information drought

But one of the issues with winery dangers is the limited information available. One study I found (Delphi assessment of occupational hazards in the wineries of Andalusia, in southern Spain by R Anaya-Aguilar at al.) admitted "there is very little in the way of scientific literature analyzing the occupational risks specific to wineries".

Anaya-Aguilar's study found that occupational risks in the wine industry were "significant", with the production area the most hazardous zone in the winery (unsprisingly). Here, they concluded a machinery operator was the most at-risk role, given (again, unsurprisingly) the often quite violent nature of the machines and their work on grapes.

Indeed, a New Zealand safety firm had this to say about winery work:

"Did you know, a staggering 20 percent of all reported wine industry injuries involve winery presses – that's five workers per year facing crushed fingers, sprains, or worse," said the website. "Working in and around winery presses presents a unique set of hazards. Unguarded machinery, slippery floors, and confined spaces can transform a routine operation into a nightmare. Crushing rollers, hydraulics, and conveyor belts pose immense pinch and crush points, while spills and leaks create slick surfaces, ripe for slips and falls. Add the pressure of harvest season, and the risk of fatigue and errors adds another layer of concern."

Recently, wineries have become more aware of the need for training (often short-term) staff in hazard identification and safe work practices. In many wineries today this is a given, with confined space training, forklift training, hazard identification and first aid.

It would be wrong to take too cynical a view of these efforts but, again, without good data on winery accidents, it is hard to work out how effective certain policies are. This is partly because – luckily – fatalities are relatively rare, although French wine news website Vitisphere pleaded last year that "winemaking can no longer cause so many deaths".

Unfortunately, such public calls tend to occur when better-known winemakers die (as was the case with Chinon winemaker Jérôme Sourdais, who tried to save the life of a cellarhand). But it seems this year has been just as bad and, again, it is hard to find the data.

In fact, it was Vitisphere which, in 2018, highlighted a 2016 survey in the Charente and Charente-Maritime departments (basically the Cognac region) in which there were 280 recorded incidents in both the vineyards and wineries.

There are, of course, limitations given the accuracy of reporting. For instance, I'm sure that, of all the accidents I personally witnessed, a minority were actually reported (as either accidents or near-misses). The same will be true more generally.

Another aspect of accident reporting would be to ascertain just how effective training can be, as it can sometimes feel as if large companies train staff so that, should an accident occur, the staff will be found to be at fault for not having followed Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). The training program will have effectively covered the company's backside (while workplace accidents are not reduced).

If you're tempted to think SOPs are there to be followed to the letter, you've clearly worked in better wineries than I (where a total adherence to the rules/training would have easily halved productivity). Or, to put it more bluntly: I've only ever met one – possibly two – people in my winery career who have ever, assiduously, buckled into a forklift seat.

But the best example of why winery safety training might not have the employees' best interests at heart came from a chat I had with a wine industry friend about a winery accident. In this instance, a daughter and wife tried to pull their father/spouse out from a fermenting vat. Tragically, they failed.

Now, pulling a limp (or even able-bodied) body that weighs the best part of 220lbs from a gaseous swamp of grape must is next to impossible, even for the very strong and even when that person is wearing a harness. But there is one way, as my friend pointed out, that it can be done: empty the vat.

I've spent the best part of the last 20 years in wineries and it's a solution I've very rarely heard. Partly, it should be admitted, for good reason: in some cases, it would take a sledgehammer or equivalent to break open a digout door at the bottom of a tank, or even pierce the tank – both of which are outright dangerous operations in themselves. Some people might take the risk. But not all tanks are huge, which reduces the danger to the person emptying the vat. Even if the tanks are large, there are ways to start draining the tank quickly (opening the valves – see CCTV footage of winery vandalism to see how easy this is).

This presupposes a number of things such as an access hatch (normally a digout door in cellar parlance) at the bottom of the tank, or simply valves for filling/emptying. But I almost feel that using tanks without such features should be illegal. Quite what that means for qvevri or the Spanish equivalent (tiñajas), which I have, uncomfortably, dug-out, I don't know.

But, all-in-all, I think we need to know more about winery accidents. There needs to be wider reporting of them and greater awareness of their circumstances. I say that as someone who has pored through more than my fair share of macabre stories in researching this.

One of the obvious solutions – not least with regard to the recent fatalities in France and Spain – is that no-one should work alone in a winery. This will make winery accountants tremble when they imagine the wage bill, but if all it takes is 30 seconds, surely having a colleague nearby drastically improves your chances should an accident occur. This isn't foolproof – as the Jérôme Sourdais story shows – but going alone into a winery (or even part of a winery) during harvest time is, undoubtedly, a terrible idea, no matter who you are.

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