Will Remain Wine Drinker!

So I took my own advice and have been working the harvest at Becker Vineyard. The important word here is WORK. Let there be no illusion, harvest is the brawny part of the wine makers art.

A short rundown of the process is: First you have to bring in the fruit by clipping off the bunches from the vine. Easier said than done. The little rascals can be firmly twisted around the canes and you have to hunt to find the stem. Then there's the standing and bending to get all the clusters. As most fruit hangs off a "fruiting wire" at the optimal height for the winegrower, that means if you're 6 inches taller than that person, you have to bend over a lot!

OK so far. The fruit is dropped in a pail. Another person rides the ATV and picks up those full buckets and leaves the empties. The pails are transported to the winery. There they are emptied into a large bin or directly into the hopper of the de-stemer and crusher. Each pail weights a good 25 pounds, which seems like a hundred after the 100th pail!

The crushed fruit minus the stems pour out the chute into another pail. Those pails have two destinations. If you are making a Rose then you load that pails content into the press, and out comes your Rose ready for a bit of yeast. Or you can empty the pail, juice and skins into a fermenting tank to make a red wine.

All in all, in this small operation you process a good 2 tons of fruit an hour. Each one of those pounds someone is lifting or cutting or pressing. The thankful part is that Harvest is once a year.

That's a snap shoot of one winery here in the Umpqua Valley. Others with a bigger operation will have mechanized many of these steps. You can go as far as letting machines do all the work, from shaking the berries off the vine, fork lifting them into huge crushers, and then pumping the juice into the fermenters.

For me it's a bit more Romantic to handle the lushish fruit from beginning to end.
Just don't expect me to ever own a winery, I prefer to drink the wine than make it!