Can machine-harvested grapes produce top-notch wines

Perhaps the major justification for hand as opposed to machine picking is the climate. In marginal regions like Burgundy where ripeness is not guaranteed, the selection that hand picking affords is essential if you want to make a decent wine, let alone a top quality wine. In the warmer, drier wines regions of Southern France and Europe, Australia and the Americas the temptation to pick by machine is difficult to resist because good grape health and ripeness is more reliable.

However, as André Roméro from the excellent Domaine la Soumade in Rasteau will tell you, quality winemaking is all about "les petits détails". Despite the Southern Rhône’s benign grape-growing climate M. Romero still believes that hand-picking constitutes the difference between a top quality wine and a reasonable wine. Winemakers in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, one of the warmest and driest wine regions in France, clearly agree because hand-picking and sorting of the grapes is compulsory. Of course ultimately it depends on whether consumers agree that the quality derived from hand-picking warrants the inevitably higher price tag.

The debate between machine and hand harvesting is a highly emotive one within the industry. Hand harvesters argue that quality wine can only be made from grapes picked by hand, as only the best fruit is selected. Machine harvesters counter that the faster harvesting speeds improve wine quality because grapes from each vineyard parcel are harvested at similar (optimal) levels of ripeness and, if there is a threat of substantial rain, grapes can be harvested quickly before the rain adversely affects grape quality. In addition, night harvesting by machine delivers cool grapes to the winery, particularly important for white wines where grapes are fermented at low temperatures to preserve fruit flavours. Hand harvesters point out that machine harvesting damages and often breaks the grapes in the vineyard leaving them exposed to oxidation.

Winemaking is a passion, but it is also a business, and the labour costs associated with picking and sorting by hand are significant. Many producers also find it increasingly difficult to source good picking labour. As a result, many producers now harvest their grapes by machine. Picking machines straddle the vine and the grapes are beaten off the vine where they are collected and conveyed by moving belts to tractor-drawn receptacles. Whereas it can take up to ten man days to pick one hectare of vines by hand, a machine can do it in under five man hours.

It is an old adage that you cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. The same applies to wine. Vignerons labour away all year in the vineyard to ensure that their grapes are of optimum quality. However many also passionately believe that the hard manual labour must continue into the harvest so that only the best grapes are picked and fermented into wine. Hand pickers only cut the best bunches from the vine and from those bunches, cut away grapes that are affected by rot or insufficiently ripe. The picking team leader then checks the contents of each picking basket when it is emptied into the tractor-drawn container. Then, as a final level of quality control, many top producers empty the harvested grapes onto sorting tables at the winery before they are transported to the fermenting vats.

C’est la rentrée - and the cars pack the autoroutes heading north. In early September all thoughts turn to the grape harvest, and the vignerons anxiously survey the fruit in their vineyards. Each vigneron has his or her own criteria for deciding on the right time to pick,. whilst keeping half an eye on the weather forecast – rain and potential rot is the vigneron’s enemy