Harvest Days
Like many of our farming neighbors, we're up before the crack of dawn. Well, at least Gerry is, if he manages to sleep at all. He heads to the winery to make a large urn of coffee and for a final equipment and weather check. If it’s a go, and it usually is, he makes a quick trip to town for bagels and ice while I set up the welcome table and the breakfast buffet. Then, the equipment gets a final sanitizing and we head to the crew tent for breakfast at 7:30 am.
We have a Crush Crew from far and near to help bring in the crop. We hire about 10 to 15 extra employees on weekend days and smaller crews made up of a few friends and neighbors on weekdays at $15 an hour for about 5 hours of work. Many harvesters come back year after year and we are excited to see them! Most of the crush crew arrive out of the morning mist before 8 am for bagels, donuts, fruit and coffee.
At 8:00 am we give the crew gloves, a harvesting tool and refresher on how to pick grapes and fill the lugs. Then we all traipse to the target rows to hand harvest the grapes where many topics of conversation can be heard through the grape vines.
When enough lugs are full, the strongest among us load the wagon, and the grapes take a short tractor trip to the crush pad to start processing the grapes. Each lug gets weighed, crushed, destemmed, the white grapes get pressed, and the grape juice, or the must, gets pumped into tanks. The process repeats throughout the afternoon until the last wagon load of grapes is processed.
After about five hours, when the grapes are picked, the party begins for the harvesters! Our sticky crew gathers for a catered lunch and imbibes in some fruits of our labor from previous years, and Gerry toasts the crush crew. We are grateful for the crew’s help to keep our small business going, especially when they know the paychecks will be tiny.
After lunch we head back to the crush pad to continue processing the grapes with our employees, sometimes into the early evening. Harvest days are long days, but great relief comes when we know the grapes we pruned in the winter and worked on during the growing season are harvested at their peak ripeness and in the tanks!
On weekends, we keep the wine flowing and the cheese snack plates going out to customers at the winery. Visitors to our winery on harvest days get a unique behind-the-scenes look at the frantic process of our grape-to-glass endeavor.
September is harvest month, though when we are not harvesting or processing the grapes we're leaf pulling in the vineyard or bottling wine in the winery. It usually takes between 10 – 12 days to harvest all our grape varieties, so it’s an action packed but fun month that we look forward to every year.