Why Handpick wine grapes?

Hand harvesting brings a different spirit. Picking is joyful and intense, rather than panicked and noisy. The selection and care of handpicking translates into better quality wines. Harvest remains a moment of pressure, the year’s work coming to fruition, but it feels vibrant rather than crushing. Hand-picking is convivial. Chatter and song break out intermittently. We have energy in the morning, the team moves up and down the rows, like a flock of birds, separate but together. By midday, the sun is baking, and we move slowly, like the stickiness on our hands is sticking us to the ground. There’s community in singing together, the feeling of the year coming together in a joyful crescendo.

More than ten years ago when we changed to 100% hand-picked, Sean and I carried bins up to the tractor together and I felt a connection with him I hadn’t felt in a while. Hand harvesting created that vibe. In a couple of hours of picking opposite Cécile, our apprentice at the time, on rows of ancient Semillon, I learnt more about her hopes and dreams, more about who she was, than in the previous months of working together.

But more concretely – why bother to hand harvest – to pick your grapes by hand? It is typically more expensive than machine harvesting in a high labour cost economy like France. Despite these on the face of it economics, here are eight reasons why it is worth choosing to handpick your grapes.

8 Reasons to Hand Harvest/ Handpick quality wine grapes

1. To respect the vines  – particularly our heritage vines

Handpicking is gentle on the vines. This is particularly important for our heritage – old vine – Semillon and Merlot. Machine harvesting can rough them up. Another unexpected benefit of this gentleness is that we have less maintenance on the trellis system. Less poles need to be replaced which saves time and money.

2. For the quality of the Fruit

We sort the grapes as we pick. That means hand-picking is better for the quality of the grapes. When we take great care through the growing season, it doesn’t make sense to follow that care with an aggressive start the grapes journey to wine.

3. To keep the sulphites low

When we hand pick the fruit the grapes remain whole so the juice/fruit does not oxidise as it is protected by the unbroken grapeskin. This means we can use no sulfites or much lower sulphites (the preservative used in wine). Imagine two bunches of grapes on your kitchen table, smash one with your fist and leave the other whole and return a couple of hours later. The smashed one (like a machine harvested grape) will already be oxidised, its quality compromised, while the other will be perfect. Sulphites are then required to stop the oxidation.

4. To be vegan friendly

Machine harvested grapes always include ‘critter collateral’, small animals like mice, lizards, snakes, frogs. When we handpick we avoid harvesting critters.

5. For the harvest vibes and human connection

Hand harvesting brings positive energy, community and care to the harvest process. We feel a totally different ambience even on long days of hard work. See my stories above and read about Harvest 2025,  Harvest 2023, Harvest 2022 , Harvest 2021, Harvest 2019 and Harvest 2018.

6. To avoid compaction of the soil

A grape harvest machine can weigh over 5 tons with harvest inside. This weight creates soil compaction. This compaction kills vine roots and asphyxiates the soil. A living soil needs air. Compaction is an enemy of vine health and of grape quality. This is perhaps the most important reason.

7. To allow us to cultivate agroforestry and biodiversity

When we changed to hand picking we were no longer required to keep the trellis clear for the harvest machine. As part of our biodiversity development Sean allowed ivy to grow up trellis poles every 20 metres or so, to feed pollinators. Ivy is one of relatively few plants that flowers in late autumn for the bees and their ilk, and it is a massive biodiversity booster. An oak tree with ivy can host double the number of species that the same oak tree without ivy would host.

Without the constraint of the harvest machine we also could have trees growing in the vineyard which helps to amortise climate extremes that result from climate change. We have trees in the vine rows that boost biodiversity and offer climate moderating effects – this would be impossible if a harvest machine had to straddle the row. Caro Feely’s latest book Cultivating Change, book 4 in the Vineyard Series (available from Amazon and Apple Books everywhere), goes into this and the magic of biodiversity in detail.

8. To Protect and Respect the Winemaker 😉

One more reason to for hand picking is to keep winemaker Sean’s fingers intact – Our first harvest in 2006 was a baptism of fire. It was a race against the clock with a heat wave followed by significant rain. We got through 90% of it without major mishap but on the last small section of Cabernet sauvignon we were all exhausted. We started the Cabernet harvest at 4.00 am. At 7.00 am after checking on our daughters I found Sean standing over the sink holding a bloody tea towel over his hand. “I’ve chopped my finger off,” he said.

“Luckily it didn’t fall into the grapes,” he added, making light of the serious situation, as we sped to Bergerac Hospital Emergency. A quarter of his finger was gone, chopped up by the harvest trailer and spewed out with the rinsing water onto our farm. Seán had become part of our land. The surgeon told me it would take six weeks of total rest and then another six months for him to have normal function in the shortened finger. Despite the doctor’s advice he was back in the winery four days later. We got through those critical weeks despite Seán being one-handed. Find the full story and more, in my first book Grape Expectations (available from Amazon and Apple Books everywhere).

Conclusion

Handpicking is part of the ethos of natural winemaking. It is good for the winegrower, for the vines and for resulting wines.

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