“Harvest is Away!”

This is what 4:30am looks like. 

The beginning of the second week, the last week of February, was the start of Harvest. The fruit was being picked at 3:30 to avoid the heat of the day and we arrived at 5am for it’s arrival. The fruit on this day was mechanically-picked which means there is a truck that drives through a line separating the rows of vines with a contraption that collects the fruit from the vine. The grapes go through this vessel to be somewhat sorted then moved up along a conveyor belt that brings them across the vine row and collects onto a crate that another tractor in the next line of vines is pulling. 

sun rises as work begins

These crates, when full and the row of vines is emptied of it's bounty, are then brought into the winery. A fork lift dispatches the grapes in the crate into a huge container, which releases the grapes, along with the vineyard’s other lively and wild collection, onto a conveyor belt.

  That’s where we have to sort through the collection as it whizzes by.  Sorting means we get rid of any leaves, stems or thick branches the mechanical-picking grabbed along the way and also, as I soon found out, picking out the spiders (dead or alive), mice (only dead that I saw), squiggling earwigs, writhing cockroaches, squished moths, and all sorts of little things found in the wildlife of a vineyard. I literally could not pull out anything except for the leaves and the twigs. Any spider or mouse or creature, I gasped and would have thrown up onto the conveyor belt or fainted off the box crate I was standing on if I had to touch and take out any such thing. Luckily, I was not the last person upon the line before the grapes and “collection” went into the machine so I did not feel so responsible, although I would openly admit my refusal to remove and acceptably knowing that I allowed something to pass by my reach.

The machine would sort out some of the debris, mostly stems, pump the grapes and juice into a chiller, and then into the press. The press would sort out the liquid from the debris (re: “collection) and the debris would settle at the bottom. So all those mice and spiders and insects that the machine-picker collects, are filtered out, but I’m pretty sure they add to the complexity of the wine, to the terroir. Rohan said that when he was working for a winery in Melbourne they would find huge lizards on the line….that, for sure, is part of the terroir – whether the bugs in the vineyard are little lady bugs or reptiles, it's all part of the climate and the land that makes the grapes taste the way they do. 

Our job to go through picking out the bits on the conveyor belt is to help the press by not having big sticks causing a bit of damage nor do they want the leaves and other things spending time with the grape juice by infusing any unwanted flavours. Add that to your list of wine vocabulary: MMMMousey.  

Looking back, the mouse is almost bearable after seeing a twitching poisonous redback spider on top of the line. The striking red line against it’s black body just stared at me daringly as I wide-eyed watched it go by in absolute horror. I doubt I will ever get that image out of my head. But, that is the difference between hand-picking and mechanically-picking. Hand-picking would not include big twigs or mice – maybe some earwigs and spiders and definitely some leaves, but whoever is cutting big branches off the vine and grabbing mice is an idiot picker.

the grape juice after it goes through the press to be pumped into tanks

It's a different kind of hard work. My body wasn't in physical pain like from bottling, but it includes long hours of standing, getting your hands wet and sticky from the grape juice, and it is pretty chilly in the dark early hours of the morning. It’s definitely a dizzying job watching the bunches of light green grapes go by with your hands ready to grab whatever is different – a sunburned crinkled brown leaf, a dark green leaf still attached to a clustered bunch of grapes, a brown stick or curly vine twig - but then there are different colours that stick out from the light green grapes such as the gnarled spiders that have drowned, the multitudes of earwigs swimming in the clear grape juice, the spiders that are still alive crawling the opposite way on the line away from their doomed death to be squeezed in the press, the huge  at least 2 inches long light brown cockroaches wriggling on their back….Anything that is not a grape, instinct tells your hands to reach out and remove it. I’ve gotten pretty good as the belt goes by, grabbing what I can in a wave of blurred-green dizziness, but my instinctive reflex to not grab something particularly nasty are even better. I need to work on my peripheral vision to anticipate what’s coming next and improve my recognition skills to process what I am about to grab before I really do squeal and pass out from some unwanted interaction with vineyard wildlife.

We all agree we should insist on handpicked grapes.