A couple of months ago, I was visiting one of my winemakers in Abruzzo, who told me that he proudly uses mechanical harvesting in his hilly vineyard. Walking the vineyards, he showed me how the trellising was set up to use a vine shaker. He even said it was better using the machine.
His frankness struck me as odd since I’ve always associated machine harvesting with good-- but not great-- wines, and thought that many producers with a pretense towards greatness would not mention such a thing. So, I noted his comments and put it away, thinking that for his target QPR range and style, it was just fine.
Then, I recently read in Jackson’s “Wine Science” book that mechanical harvesting can, in many cases, be better than hand harvesting. I think economic factors and logistical factors were weighted evenly with wine quality in his evaluation, but looking at the numbers for juicing, MOG, stems, etc., it appears that both methods are pretty close, except in situations where there is rot and a couple of other circumstances.
Anyway, I was a bit surprised to read all of this, and realized that maybe my basic paradigm that “high quality wine needs to be hand harvested,” needs revision, so I’d love to hear thoughts on the topic.
I’m particularly interested in how far quality can go with machine harvesting, so if anyone knows of any particular wines that are harvested this way, I’d appreciate hearing.
My experience with machine harvesting was very positive.
I have even worked with machine-picked [gasp] Pinot. (I can hear the “pfffts” from people reading this already). The bins that showed up were as clean, if not cleaner, and as whole berry, if not more, than anything we could get through our hand-picking, cluster sorting and Delta destemmer. The biggest MOG problems were petioles, of which there plenty (and the occasional sprinkler head). Other than them, very very clean and pristine. Very little berry breakage or juicing. We would just throw it straight into the tank.
It costs 1/3 of hand-harvesting, the stuff can be picked and on the deck as early as you want, if you were 100% machine picked, conceivably you could eliminate all the capital investment and labor that goes with processing (easily the least efficient part of winemaking, even though it’s the part everyone loves to show off), and its availability is not subject to political wavering. You could still do some sorting if you felt compelled, too.
Of course, there are some juicing and travel concerns. I worked with machine-picked whites in NZ, and if skin contact is your thing, it’s great for that. If you prefer whole-cluster type wines, not gonna work for you.
The technology is pretty darn good. I think all paradigms need to be revisited. I think wines of very high-quality can be made form machine-harvested fruit. I don’t think you will see it much on the super high-end here, since the topography, size, etc of many places don’t allow it and it really isn’t necessary.
Thin-skinned whites like SB will inevitably have some juicing and skin contact while in transport when machine-picked. In NZ, they often think this is a positive, as many producers put some extra time in inside the winery to get some amount of skin contact before pressing. Machine-picking may be part of the NZ “style” in some ways.
I would describe what arrived from vineyards more than an hour or so away that were machine-picked SB as more a “soup” than anything.
Contact is a stylistic preference though, and many tend to think of whole cluster as higher-quality depending on some case-specific factors (some clones of Chard are well suited to it, for example).