Grape harvesting?

[tonym]

Do many vineyards in Australia harvest their grapes by hand picking? At what price range would you expect a wine to be hand picked? I was recently in the Napa valley and saw a couple of large vineyards using mechanical harvesters and was surprised at the amount of leaf material that ends up in the grape bins.

[paulf]

There would be plenty that harvest by hand. As I understand it, the mechanical harvesters aren't suitable for many sloping vineyards and the older models of mechanical harvester were particularly brutal to both vines and poles.They are also prohibitively expensive for smaller operations.
I'd imagine that any small vineyard that is particular about it's harvest times probably isn't going to be mechanical - if you are picking different parcels of fruit at different times it isn't going to be cost effective to get the mechanical harvester in for each small parcel you need to pick.
I have no idea on pricing as there are a lot of variables there - cropping levels, grape type, trellising type and probably a bunch of other factors would have impact on pricing

[mjs]

Bought a small quantity of A grade cabernet fruit this year and chose hand-picking as well. Hand picking cost an additional $1200/t

Have to say that the grapes looked superb, no MOG of course, now safely in barrel

[Mahmoud Ali]

I would imagine all the old vine vineyards would be hand harvested, as would be bush vine grenache and late harvest botrytis vines. If I recall Zema Estates in the Coonawarra prided themselves on being one of the few wineries using manual harvesting.

Mahmoud.

[dingozegan]

Do many vineyards in Australia harvest their grapes by hand picking? At what price range would you expect a wine to be hand picked? {....} vineyards using mechanical harvesters and was surprised at the amount of leaf material that ends up in the grape bins.

I don't think it's possible to predict based on price. I'd say it's more dependent on winemaking, practical and commercial decisions (e.g., hand pick aromatic whites to avoid field oxidation; hand pick bush vines).

Plenty of MOG in machine harvested fruit! Those machine harvested Cabernets are just picking up extra terroir with all those eucalypt leaves in the ferment

[Matt@5453]

Hand picking generally costs between $400 - $700 per tonne depending on variety and availability of labour. As mentioned above, a series of decisions based on vine age, vine type, logistics etc all influence hand picking decisions. Hand picking skills are slowly diminishing and its hard to get labour when you need it.

MOG from harvesters is a fact of life; leaf matter, canes, spiders, snakes, nuts, bolts, lizards and so forth. But destemmers take care of this in the winery. Some winemakers suggest that the right levels of MOG add complexity

[pokolbinguy]

The use of machine harvesting is very much variable depending on the wine style that is winemaker/winery is aiming for and the vineyard the fruit is coming from.

If the aim is cheap plonk then there is no doubt that it will be by a machine. Not is this just because the harvesting is cheaper (generally) but the vineyards are also larger, with larger crops and grown in areas planned for this style of wine production (e.g Riverland). On the flip side if the target is highend wine then is will be driven more by style and logistics.

Sometimes it is cheaper to hand pick than machine harvest if the tonne/ha rate is low (e.g fruit spread out and sparse) as the harvester has to travel too far to make it worth while when a hand picker will just walk past, so even if the target style is not high end the decision to pick by hand may out way machine....but then it comes down to if it is really economically viable in the first place.

When it comes to whites, especially if the vineyard is a distance from the winery than better quality fruit will be hand picked to limit skin contact and oxidation rather than having the fruit sit around in picking bins for hours on end when the fruit is destined for a light fresh style of wine...however it is amazing how much a little bit of skim milk can do wonders if needed.

On the other side of the coin is red fruit, which inherently goes through to be fermented on skins anyway so the skin contact in the picking bins is considered a non issue but then again machine harvesting does not leave the option to drop dud fruit on the vineyard floor if the hand pickers deem it not goo enough, especially in a wet/poor vintage.

Of course all of this is a really easy decision if the vineyard is on a steep slope, the vintage is wet, the posts and wires are in bad condition or the winemaker is just hell bent on hand picking. In these cases a Machine harverster will just do more damage than good. On the flip side if all these concerns don't exisit if the operator of the machine harvester knows what they are doing and not rushing then if operated correctly you would hardly know a machine was used to pick the fruit until you realise there is still a stalk on the vine.