Harvest

Over the last few months, we’ve dragged the kids to vineyards in South Africa, Chile, and most recently in New Zealand.

But this is the first time we’ve ever hit the timing right for the harvest.

The harvesting machine that drives between the rows of vines and shakes the grapes off… though the Premium lines are of course picked by hand

We saw these machines all over Waipura and Marlborough, lumbering between the rows of vines, shaking the grapes (and surrounding stems and sticks and leaves) into long troughs.

While we were in Nelson, Seth needed a haircut, so we dropped him off at a barber in Richmond and the rest of us nipped out to Te Mania.  (It’s fair to say that Barbara has a good deal more interest in visiting vineyards than does Seth.)

The kids moaned and groaned and, once they established that Te Mania did not offer chocolate tastings the way really good vineyards do, made a Big Point of bringing their electronic gizmos into the tasting room so they would have something to do while Tom and Barbara and I tasted.

Outside the tasting room, lounging around on a large deck, laughing and sipping oaked pinot noir with great enthusiasm, were about ten surprisingly scruffy looking young (er, that is, under thirty) people.  One hates to generalize about such things, but they didn’t have the typical Wine Taster air about them.  (We have found, when we’ve done tastings around the world, that our kids are invariably the youngest people in the room… and very often, Tom and I are the second youngest.)

It turned out that they were the hand-picking harvest crew, and that they’d just finished the pinot noir harvest, and they were out on the deck with the vineyard owner and the foreman, celebrating.  They were a fun global bunch — two from Italy, one from Germany, a couple from Denmark, two from Australia — some of them doing harvesting work for the first time, several making a year or two out of it, traveling from wine country to wine country following the harvest season.

We chatted with them until the pinot was drunk, at which point the vineyard owner and the hired hands wandered off, and William, the foreman, asked if we’d like a look around.

We did!

Investigating the harvest

Grapes, shoots and leaves

The shoots and leaves are jostled out on the conveyer belt. At least, most of them are.

 

The (mostly) grapes are dumped into the press, where they’re rolled into grape juice, with leftover grape grog

The filtered grape juice comes out of the bottom of the press, to be made into pinot grigio

The leftover grog comes out of the other pipe…

… to be sampled by curious Americans

“Oaking…”