The harvest! The culmination of a whole year of preparation and meticulous work in the vineyards to reach the optimal quality and balance in our grapes to ensure we once again can turn them into some delicious wines.
We have individual library posts on the single processes that all together comprise the "harvest", but we wanted here to give you the big fat overview!
Selecting the few lucky clusters...
First at winter pruning, and then continuously during spring and summer, we will have limited the plant to carry a very specific number of branches and clusters and also shaped the canopy. This all to ensure the perfect balance between grapes and leaves to guarantee the just right amount of energy to perfectly ripen the grapes and also optimal shade for the fruit to ripen without getting sunburned.
Even so, a few weeks before the harvest itself, we once again pass though all rows and remove a rather substantial (sometimes more than 50% !) of the grapes. This is to really allow the plant to focus on getting those few lucky remaining clusters of grapes totally perfect!
That oh-so important timing!
The timing of the grape harvest is crucial and is determined by a combination of factors such as sugar levels, acidity, pH, and flavour development. We carefully monitor these parameters to decide the optimal time for picking the grapes. This is done both by visually looking at the color of the stems and grape seeds, the browner, the riper. Measuring the sugar content = potential alcohol of the grapes with a thing call a refractometer and also the acidity and ph. However, most importantly we taste and chew quite the amount of grapes during the weeks leading up to harvest to check the aromatic development and ripeness of tannins.
There is no "golden rule" here so to say, as we are looking for very specific things depending on which wine we wish to make with the given variety or vineyard-parcel in question. E.g. we harvest a part of both our Grenache and Pinot Noir early for our rosé wines to ensure a more fresh and bright flavour profile, higher acidity and slightly lower potential alcohol. The stems and grape seeds will be green and unripe at this point, but as we always destem everything and the rosé wines only macerate with skin and seeds very shortly this is not an issue, whereas the grapes used for our red wines undergoing a longer maceration before they are pressed off the solid matters, will need to be riper to ensure we get no green, unripe tannin from the seeds into our wines.
We always start out with a plan for the harvest, but as Mother Nature is always fickle and ever-changing, our plan needs to be changed accordingly. The increasingly warm and somewhat unstable climate conditions are not making things easier and there is no longer any "norm". Each year is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get!
Picking our precious grapes
When we decide that the moment has come to pick a specific variety with a specific wine in mind, we send our team of brilliant field workers out there at the crack of dawn, well actually even earlier than that! We sometimes begin at 3am!
This is to ensure that the aromatic qualities of the grapes is preserved, and also to ensure that our dear workers don't die of heatstroke! To further preserve freshness and quality of fruit, the grapes are always chilled for at least 24 hours in our cooling chamber at 4C.
We pick all grapes by hand, as it's a more precise way of picking than any machine can do, but also because we from an idealistic point of view have decided to only want human hands and not machines to touch our grapes!
Lots of grapes are machine harvested, and its not a bad thing entirely. Machines are super sophisticated today and very efficient, plus, the don't mind getting up even earlier to harvest! Finding great workers willing and capable of doing a precise picking job is becoming less and less easy, so many producers reply increasingly on machines.
What happens next?
The now cold and crispy and beautifully fragrant grapes are hand sorted on our vibrating sorting table, to remove bugs and less than perfect individual grapes from the clusters.
The grapes are then destemmed and for our whites and rosé wines more or less immediately pressed to extract the juice, which then undergoes the magic fermentation that turns the innocent juice into delicious wine. (The grapes for our rosés will spend a couple of hours in the press to take on just enough color and beautiful aromatics from the skins before we press)
The grapes for the red wines are pumped into fermentation vats directly from the destemmer to undergo the fermentation on the skins for period of time till we decide that we have extracted the perfect amounts of flavour, tannin and colour.
From here on our baby wines undergo a whole serious of gentle "spa treatments" that you can read more more about in the library under words like: pump-over, punch-down and maturation.
Why is the grape harvest such a crucial step in winemaking?
The grape harvest is a critical step in winemaking because the quality of the grapes directly impacts the quality of the wine. By carefully monitoring and managing the harvest process, we can ensure that we are working with the best possible fruit to create exceptional wines.
The harvest of grapes is a meticulous and essential process in the world of winemaking. The next time you enjoy a glass of our wines (or any other wine!), take a moment to appreciate the careful work that goes into harvesting the lovely grapes that makes the liquid wonder in your glass possible.
