Towards the end of August and the beginning of September almost all of Italy goes wine harvest mad as every vineyard goes through the painstaking but joyous process of grape picking. When you have a country as historically and passionately associated with wine as Italy, the harvest is a fantastic blend of culture, tradition, hard work but ultimately enjoyment.

Follow up:

Whether you are a serious viticulturist or it is your first time taking part in wine harvest, you cannot fail to love the whole process. The beauty of wine for the serious enthusiast is that no year can provide the exact same bottle so there are always subtle changes and differences for them to enjoy. For the beginner, just learning the process from grape to bottle is fascinating and there is always a lot of tasting opportunities along the way.

I took part in my first harvest in Tuscany last year and it was hugely educational but hard work! I was part of a 12 man team that were helping out at a friend’s newly acquired vineyard. The family who had purchased it are UK based and very knowledgeable about wine and had bought a farmhouse with a small vineyard as a retirement project.

The harvest that I was taking part in was their first since moving in to the home so everyone was a little nervous, but still very excited. Very few vineyards in Italy use automatic grape picking machines so most, even some of the largest producers, still use the traditional source of picking by hand. This is because humans have the advantage of natural selection, so if a bunch looks old, or stale, they will not end up in the final bottle. Also, automatic machines end up picking off a lot of the stalks and leaves which you do not want going through the destalking machines into the vats.

The were all put into pairs and with secateurs in hand, worked their way down the row of vines, one on each side. I was in charge of driving the tractor around the vines, collecting the picked grapes, driving them down to the cantina (where the large vats are for storing them) and putting them through the destalking machine. Each row of grapes on any vineyard in the world is always laid out so that a tractor can fit down the middle to collect picked grapes.

The destalking machine is an open top stainless steel barrel that has a rotating corkscrew device that pushes bunches of grapes down into the spiralling colander system. This machine separates the grapes from the stalks and at one end the empty stalks are deposited and at the other, the squashed grape skins and juices are pumped through a tube straight into the fermentation vats.

If making red wine, sulphates are added to the mix of grape skins and juices and then left in the vats for a week, stirring the contents three times a day. After a week, the vats are then vacuumed and sealed for the fermentation process to continue.

In all it took two 3 day weekends to do the whole vineyard and although long lunches with an abundance of food were enjoyed, everyone certainly worked hard to achieve a cantina full of fermenting red and white wine.

Matthew Fox