Harvest: A Day in the Controlled Chaos of a Winery

Wine Process Series - Part 1 of 17

Harvest is controlled chaos. At least you hope it is. It is the point during the year when everything has to work together at exactly the right time. The vineyard crew, tractors, bins, receiving area, sorting table, destemmer, press, cellar crew, laboratory, refrigeration, forklifts, tanks, winemaker, and oenologist all become parts of the same machine. One of them gets behind, and suddenly grapes are sitting somewhere you do not want them sitting.

I have harvested in very different environments, including places where daytime temperatures simply make it undesirable to pick during the day and others where harvesting under the afternoon sun presents no particular problem. That alone changes the entire rhythm of harvest.

In a warm climate, the day can begin in the middle of the night. Midnight, 2:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m. There is nothing particularly romantic about an alarm clock going off at that hour, but there is a very good reason for doing it. Grapes are living fruit, and temperature matters tremendously once they leave the vine. Fruit sitting in the vineyard through a hot afternoon can easily arrive at the winery at 25, 30 °C, or even warmer, depending on the location and conditions. Once berries start breaking, juice is exposed to oxygen, microorganisms, and naturally occurring enzymes. At warmer temperatures, everything happens faster. Oxidation happens faster. Microbial activity accelerates. Native yeasts become more active. Aromatic compounds can be lost. If you intend to press delicate white grapes or preserve freshness and aromatics, bringing hot fruit into the winery means you are already starting behind.

It also takes a tremendous amount of energy to cool several tons of warm grapes. If I can harvest that same fruit at 12 or 15 °C during the night instead of 30 °C during the afternoon, I have given myself a considerable advantage before the grapes ever reach the winery. Cooler fruit buys me time. Not unlimited time, but enough time to manage the incoming volume intelligently. It slows microbial activity and spontaneous fermentation and allows me, when necessary, to hold fruit briefly in a cold room while we accumulate enough grapes for a proper press load.

That last point is something people outside a winery do not always think about. You do not necessarily harvest one bin of grapes and immediately press it. A press has a working capacity, and ideally, I want an appropriate amount of fruit in it. If the vineyard is delivering fruit gradually, I may have to collect enough grapes to fill the press properly. That means those first grapes need somewhere to go while the remainder arrives. In the right conditions, refrigerated storage gives us that buffer. It is not an excuse to leave grapes sitting around all day. It is simply another tool for controlling what happens between the vineyard and the juice.

In cooler regions, the situation can be completely different. If daytime temperatures remain moderate, there may be no technical reason to harvest at 3:00 in the morning. We can start after sunrise and continue throughout the day. Visibility is better, vineyard work is easier to coordinate, and the grapes can still arrive at perfectly acceptable temperatures. This is why I am always cautious when someone tells me there is one correct way to harvest grapes. There isn't. The right answer depends on climate, variety, vineyard, wine style, weather, winery capacity, and what you are actually trying to accomplish. Sometimes harvesting at 2:00 a.m. is absolutely the right choice. Somewhere else, harvesting at 2:00 p.m. is perfectly fine.

The Clock Starts the Moment the Grapes Leave the Vine

Once harvesting begins, I tend to be everywhere.

I will be moving through the vineyard rows, checking that the crew is picking what we want and leaving behind what we do not. I am looking at the condition of the fruit, the amount of material other than grapes ending up in the bins, whether damaged or diseased clusters are being removed, whether bins are being overfilled, whether fruit is getting crushed unnecessarily, and whether the crew is moving at an appropriate pace.

That last part works both ways. Too slowly can be a problem, but so can too quickly.

If the vineyard can pick ten tons an hour and the winery can only process five, congratulations, you have not improved your harvest efficiency. You now have five tons of grapes per hour sitting around waiting for someone to deal with them.

Harvest is about flow.

The vineyard and winery cannot operate as separate departments during harvest. They are one system. The rate at which I harvest fruit has to correspond reasonably well to the rate at which I can receive, sort, destem, crush, press, or otherwise process it. A mechanical harvester, for example, can deliver enormous quantities of fruit very quickly. That can be extremely efficient, but only if the winery is prepared to absorb that volume. Hand harvesting usually creates a different rhythm, but even then, a strong picking crew can overwhelm receiving if nobody has thought through the logistics.

So I am running from one row to another, checking fruit, talking to the vineyard crew, and watching how quickly bins are filling. Then I may hop onto the tractor bringing the grapes back because my attention immediately shifts to the next problem.

Is receiving ready?

The grapes do not care that somebody has gone to lunch.

They also do not care that a pump is being used somewhere else, that someone forgot to sanitize the destemmer, that the forklift is charging, or that the press is still occupied with the previous load.

By the time that tractor reaches the winery, the receiving team should already know exactly what is coming. Which vineyard? Which block? Which variety? Approximately how much fruit? Whether it is being sorted, destemmed, crushed, whole-cluster pressed, or moved into cold storage, and which tank it is ultimately going into. None of these should be decisions that begin when the tractor appears in the driveway.

Once the grapes reach the winery, the next decisions begin immediately. In Part 2, From Grapes to Must: What Happens the Moment Fruit Hits the Winery, we follow the fruit through receiving, weighing, sampling, sorting, destemming, crushing, and its first contact with oxygen.

Once the fruit arrives, things need to move quickly, but they also need to move gently. Speed does not mean throwing grapes around. The objective is to avoid unnecessary berry breakage and oxidation while getting the fruit where it needs to go. If we are sorting, the sorting table needs to be running and staffed. If we are destemming, the machine needs to be ready. If the grapes are going directly into the press, that press had better be available. If they need to go into the cold room, someone needs to have remembered that cold rooms have finite space.

Harvest is remarkably good at exposing every weakness in winery planning.

The tank someone was going to clean "later" suddenly becomes the tank you need now. The forklift always seems to be on the opposite side of the winery. A hose disappears. Someone needs the pump somebody else is using. The one piece of equipment that behaved perfectly for the previous eleven months decides that this is its moment to develop a personality.

This is harvest.

Meanwhile, the Laboratory Is Already Working

While all of this movement is happening, somebody also needs to tell me what exactly we just harvested.

Representative samples need to move into the laboratory quickly. Brix gives us an indication of sugar concentration and potential alcohol. pH and titratable acidity tell us about the acid structure of the must. Depending on the winery and the wine we are making, we may also be looking at malic acid, yeast-assimilable nitrogen, potassium, or other analytical parameters.

The word representative is important.

If I take three particularly ripe berries from the top of a bin, squeeze them into a refractometer, and declare the vineyard 25 Brix, I have not performed analysis. I have performed wishful thinking with laboratory equipment.

Sampling has to represent the fruit. During harvest, laboratory accuracy begins before anyone touches an instrument.

The lab technician or oenologist needs to receive properly identified samples, run the analyses, and communicate the information quickly because those numbers can influence decisions that are happening immediately. The juice may need an acid adjustment. Nutrient strategy may change. Sulfur additions may be considered. Settling protocols, maceration decisions, and fermentation planning can all be influenced by what we learn during those first analyses.

The exact separation between winemaker, oenologist, and laboratory technician varies enormously between wineries. In a smaller operation, one person may wear several of those hats. In a larger operation, the oenologist may be heavily involved with analytical work, fermentation monitoring, and technical cellar decisions while the winemaker maintains responsibility for the overall direction and style of the wine.

During harvest, job titles become less important anyway.

If something needs to happen, someone needs to make it happen.

As the winemaker, I may be standing in the vineyard one moment, checking the sorting table twenty minutes later, looking at lab numbers after that, and then wondering why the next load of fruit has not arrived yet. Or, more often, wondering why three loads have arrived at the same time.

At the same time, I am dealing with today's fruit while already thinking about tomorrow. What block comes next? Is it really ready? What does the weather look like? Do we have enough tank space? When is the press going to be available? Which fermentations are already active? What needs a pump-over? What requires attention in the cellar while we are busy receiving new grapes? How much can the picking crew realistically harvest before we become the bottleneck?

That is probably the part of harvest that is hardest to explain. You are never dealing only with what is happening in front of you. You are mentally working several hours, sometimes several days, ahead while simultaneously reacting to whatever has just gone wrong.

The receiving decisions eventually lead to one of the first major physical transformations of the fruit. In Part 3, Pressing: Where Juice Extraction Becomes a Winemaking Decision, we look at how pressing determines what is extracted from the grapes and what moves forward as juice.

Even Marketing Has to Be Ready for Harvest

There is now another member of the harvest team that did not have quite the same importance twenty or thirty years ago: the person holding a phone.

Social media has become an important part of harvest. Consumers want to see it, and frankly, they should. There are few better opportunities to remind people that wine is an agricultural product and that an enormous amount of physical work happens before anything reaches a bottle.

The problem is that harvest is possibly the worst time for the marketing team to suddenly appear and announce that they would like everyone to stop working for a video.

That part also needs planning.

If you want photographs of night harvesting, arrange it in advance. If you want a shot of the tractor coming through the vineyard at sunrise, know which vineyard is being harvested and approximately when that tractor will move. If you want footage of the sorting table or press, coordinate with the cellar team. If you want the winemaker standing peacefully in the vineyard explaining the vintage for five minutes, I strongly suggest you do not attempt it while six tons of fruit are sitting outside the winery waiting to be processed.

Harvest produces incredible content because nothing needs to be staged. There is movement everywhere. Machinery, tractors, bins, grapes, people, juice, dirt, sunrise, headlights in the vineyard, pumps, presses, and usually a winemaker who has forgotten what day it is.

The authenticity is already there.

The marketing team simply has to capture it without becoming another piece of equipment I need to move out of the way.

And Somehow, We Love It

Harvest can be hell.

The days are long. Sometimes the nights are longer. Your boots are wet. Everything becomes sticky. You eat when you have time, which often means standing somewhere between a tank and a forklift. Coffee becomes a food group. The schedule changes continuously. Machinery breaks. Weather forecasts change. Grapes arrive early, late, or all at once.

But harvest is also why we do this.

An entire growing season has led to this moment. Pruning, budbreak, frost scares, flowering, fruit set, canopy management, heat, rain, disease pressure, irrigation decisions, birds, ripening, and hundreds of walks through the vineyard all eventually end with somebody cutting that first cluster from the vine.

Until then, the wine is still only potential.

During harvest, it becomes real.

That is why the smallest decisions matter. The temperature of the fruit matters. The way it is handled matters. How long it sits matters. Sorting matters. Press loading matters. Laboratory work matters. Communication matters. Even knowing when to slow the vineyard crew down matters.

A successful harvest is rarely the result of one brilliant winemaking decision. It is hundreds of relatively small decisions made correctly, one after another, while everything around you is moving.

That is what most people never see when they look at a beautiful photograph of harvest.

They see grapes.

I see a tractor that needs to get to the winery, a press that is almost ready, a lab sample waiting for results, a tank that needs to be prepared, three rows that still need to be picked, and another vineyard that I am already thinking about for tomorrow.

And then, eventually, the last bin arrives.

For about thirty seconds, there is a sense of relief.

Then you remember that the grapes are now inside the winery.

The grapes have arrived, but the next decisions are just beginning. In Part 4, Before Fermentation: The Quiet Hours That Shape the Wine, we move into the period between receiving the fruit and the moment fermentation begins.

The winemaking has only just begun.

Wine Process Series

1. Harvest: A Day in the Controlled Chaos of a Winery

2. From Grapes to Must: What Happens the Moment Fruit Hits the Winery

3. Pressing: Where Juice Extraction Becomes a Winemaking Decision

4. Before Fermentation: The Quiet Hours That Shape the Wine

5. The Start of Fermentation: When Grape Juice Becomes Wine

6. Fermentation in Full Swing: When Every Sense Goes to Work

7. The Final Third of Fermentation: Where Problems Often Begin

8. Fermentation Is Over. The Wine Is Not Finished.

9. Racking: What Stays, What Goes, and Why

10. Lees: The Material at the Bottom of the Tank Is Not Waste

11. Wine Aging Vessels: Stainless Steel, Concrete, Amphora and Oak

12. Oak Is Not Just Oak

13. The First Months of Maturation: When Doing Less Becomes the Job

14. Blending: When Separate Wines Become the Final Wine

15. Clarification and Stabilization: Making the Wine Ready to Bottle

16. From Cellar to Bottle: The Final Check

17. Bottle Maturation: When Control Changes Form

About the Author

Sébastien Gavillet is COO of Wine Aromas - Le Nez du Vin. A renowned wine and whisky expert, winemaker, and distiller, Sébastien has been working with Le Nez du Vin for over 25 years. He is the author of Discovering and Mastering Single Malt Scotch Whisky and the International Whisky Guide series. He serves as a panel chair and examiner for The Council of Whiskey Masters, shaping global tasting standards and mentoring the next generation of spirits professionals.