ALDER YARROW FROM VINOGRAPHY

Does Machine Harvesting Lower Wine Quality?…As some of you know, I recently spent some time on a press trip down in Australia. I’m still working through my notes from that trip, but one of the main points of interest for me were the vineyard practices of many of the producers, in particular with regards to harvesting. Many wineries, of various sizes, opted to do mechanical harvesting, rather than harvest by hand.

“Opted” may be slightly inaccurate, however, as the choice is less one of philosophy rather than necessity for most. While the United States, Europe, South Africa and other major wine regions have the benefit of rather large populations of people willing and able to take on the low-wage, high effort labor of managing and harvesting vineyards, Australia most certainly does not. While it is a country of immigrants, the population remains quite low, and the costs of managing vineyards by hand end up being quite high.

So many wineries do a lot of work by machine whenever they can, reserving their hand labor for things like the old bush vines that cannot be harvested by anything other than a stooping back and a sharp blade.

Machine harvesting has several implications to the nature of wine production. To harvest by machine, the grapes must be trained on vertical trellises (or other such regular arrangements), and larger blocks need to be harvested at once, regardless of some of the smaller variations in ripeness between vines, or even between clusters on the same vines. The grapes are moved about using centripetal force and conveyor belts and gravity, and more MOG (Material Other than Grapes) ends up in the bins that get transported to the winery.

Authorized by Alder Yarrow to publish in Andes Wines.

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