PROSSER, Benton County — Thursday, Oct. 6 — I felt a bit like Lucy or Ethel in that episode where they go to work on the production line at a candy factory.

I had to keep corking the wine bottles fast enough or the filler machine would overflow and spill some of the lovely, golden Collage dessert wine. And that would be alcohol abuse.

I'm staying the night at the Vintner's Inn bed-and-breakfast at the Hinzerling Winery, the oldest family-owned and operated winery in the Yakima Valley. I'd arrived less than an hour earlier and already they had put me to work.

This wasn't a big factory. It's more like an oversize garage, but it's Mike Wallace's winery, where winemaker Wallace and a crew of four were spending the afternoon bottling dessert wines Visitors sometimes get to join in. One person pulls out clean bottles and pumps them full of nitrogen (to get rid of the oxygen), another works the six-spigot filler machine (sort of like a cow milker, but in reverse), the next boxes and corks (my job) and the last hammers in the corks and seals the boxes. The pace is brisk, but nobody's getting ulcers. Above a counter, a banner reads "Life is a cabernet, my friend."

Wallace, 63, a leader in the then-fledgling local wine industry when I worked at the Yakima newspaper 22 years ago, could have sold out or gone big-time years ago. Instead, he's stayed small. In fact, he's even sold his vineyards and now specializes simply in making wines from other growers' grapes — mostly port and these sweet and soothing dessert wines.

While he's watched friends and neighbors sell out and get rich, he hasn't done either. He still drives his own truck to Seattle every six weeks or so to deliver to a select bunch of fine wine stores. Why not distribute through big supermarkets and chain stores?

"I don't like to sell in big stores, you get lost on the shelves. And they like you to deliver every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday except for when the moon is in the wrong phase — which is fine, but it just doesn't work for us."

Instead, Wallace, a Seattle native who did graduate work in viticulture and enology at the University of California at Davis, has played around with port, a personal taste he has developed.

"Fortunately, there's enough port drinkers out there to support my hobby and my habit." A ruby port is now his biggest seller, moving a couple hundred cases a year.

"I like doing what I do. My wife says I work for slave wages. I make a living, but I haven't gotten rich. I tell people I'll probably be found face down in a tank some day," he said with a wry smile. "If it's port, that would be OK."

Note: The Vintner's Inn here is a nice, old, two-story house that was going to be torn down in town nearby. So Mike Wallace bought it and had it moved on a big truck to sit next to his winery. Details: www.hinzerling.com.