The dominant color in the busy backyard scene on a recent Saturday afternoon was purple. There were purple splashes on the ground, on tables, on plants. Hardworking guys had purple on their shirts, their shorts, their socks.

This happens once a year in Kurt Burris' River Park yard. The neighborhood pitches in. It's the Sacramento 2009 version of a barn raising.

Burris was bottling his two barrels of homemade wine - Chateau Relaxeau, he calls it - and a couple dozen neighbors and friends came to help.

Well, and to drink wine.

Still, they were hustling. There were five guys on the bottling line, five more people were at a table putting labels on the bottles. Burris, on the other hand, was sitting in the shade sipping his 2008 effort, his El Dorado County syrah.

"I try to do as little work as possible," he said. Around him, the bottling and labeling continued at a good pace, though a couple of the bottlers and all the labelers had their own glasses of wine.

"They're trained pretty well. They think it's fun," he said.

There you go. Kurt Burris: modern-day Tom Sawyer. Except, really, it is fun. (Plus his wife, Leslie, feeds everyone.)

Jon Marshac was seriously colored purple. He was operating the bottle-filling unit, which is a 3-foot-wide device that sucks wine from what Burris calls a fermenter (actually a rubber garbage can) and pours it into a wine bottle. It's vacuum-powered and controlled by hand. To get it started, Marshac had to suck on the wine tubes.

"There are worse jobs in the world," he said.

Marshac, by the way, got his duties not because he's a home winemaker himself and has known Burris for years.

"Job assignments?" Burris said. "Purely random."

Tom Peltier, a Land Park resident and another longtime friend, had the most physical job, yanking down a big handle on the machine that inserts the corks.

"I mistakenly sat closest to the machine," he said.

At this time of year, in this region, there are loads of jobs exactly like that being done in loads of backyards, garages and driveways. One of the benefits of being so close to so many high-quality vineyards in every direction is there's an abundance of high-quality grapes the vineyards need to move every fall.

And that, along with a growing, communicable passion for wine, has infused this area with home winemakers.

That same Saturday, Jim Ramos, who owns Oro Vista Vineyard near Coloma and who teaches home winemaking classes - in part to generate new customers for his grapes - had his own harvest event going.

"If you know what you're doing, it's hard to go wrong making your own wine in this area," Ramos said. "There is so much good fruit."

Burris, who was formally trained in winemaking at the University of California, Davis, and who works in sales for Madroña Vineyards near Placerville, gets his grapes from his employer. But his friends source from all over this region.

"And so many people do it," he said. "Just in this neighborhood, there are eight or 10 of these bottling parties going on about now."

In Burris' case, party is the operational word. His next-door neighbors Ken and Benita Whithall add to the festivities by taking down a section of fence and putting a bounce house in their yard for the children of the "workers." They've been doing this for years, so I asked Ken Whithall why he hadn't just put in a gate.

"A gate?" he said. "Anyone can put in a gate. This shows some effort."

I also asked how this bottling was progressing.

"This is the first year the labelers are keeping up with the bottlers," Whithall said.

Had the labelers gotten better?

"No," he said. "They're drinking less."

Not drinking much wine appears to be a key to home winemaking productivity. Burris said that's partly why his two best assistant winemakers are his 11-year-old son, Connor, and Connor's buddy, Max Busby.

"They run the press for me, and they're great at it," Burris. "One of the reasons is they stay sober."

Burris' two barrels of, this year, zinfandel, managed to get poured into a bit more than 50 cases of bottles by late afternoon, and despite the purple everywhere, there was a remarkably small amount of real spillage. Each of the helpers - except Connor and Max - got a case of wine.

"Most of the stuff we make, you need to drink within five years. "Usually," Burris said looking around at his friends, "that's not a problem."

And how is this vintage turning out?

Burris tasted the still-young wine carefully.

"I think this is going to be really nice," he said. "I may be biased."

Call The Bee's Rick Kushman, (916) 321-1187. Listen to him Tuesdays at 8:40 a.m. on NewsTalk 1530 (KFBK).