February to April mark prime time for the annual grape harvest in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Chile, but those countries landing north of the equator in the northern hemisphere typically harvest August – October. This grants winemakers the opportunity to travel during their quiet time and acquire additional experience and share ideas. See The Flying Winemakers.

This is a snap shot of a year in the life of a French vigneron. You can almost flip this scenario upside-down to get a better idea of the happenings down under. This of course is a rough guide, as climate change is making the winemaker’s calender more difficult to predict every year.

January – February: Pruning starts in December but will run right through January, February and into March. The ground is might be frozen but vines will survive temperatures as low as -18 degrees C.

March – May: Vines emerge from dormancy and work starts on the soil to loosen it and aerate around the base of the vines. Ploughing finishes in April, although the soil is worked again in May to kill weeds. Sprays are used to protect against oidium and mildew. April and May brings risk of frost and hail, which can often be difficult to protect against.

June – August: Flowering begins! Spraying must continue. The Bordeaux mixture is a vine treatment, comprising copper sulphate, slaked lime and water, which is sprayed onto the vines to treat downy mildew. It is permitted for use in organic and biodynamic vineyards. There is a third cultivation of the soil against weeds. Long shoots are trimmed to help focus vine energy on the fruit. It is time to prepare for harvest.

September – October: The vintage usually begins in the third week of September when the grapes are ripe for the picking, although this has been getting earlier in recent years. Depending on the grape and the vineyard, harvest may run for a few weeks, and whether hand picking or machine harvesting, it is a seriously busy time. All hands on deck. The new wine is fermenting. Click here to check out the harvest at Chateau Bauduc last year.

November-December: Some wines may go into barrel, but the fresh whites, which may or may not have been resting on fine lees (dead yeast cells which impart extra flavour), will be filtered, refined and bottled. Constant management of wines still in production is required and the bottling of older wine can take place. Vineyards are prepared for the new year and pruning begins.

All year round, the winemaker must manage racking, topping up and bottling of older wines – those that require more time in barrel or in tank.

Pictured: Basket pressing at Langmeil, Barossa Valley

It’s one of the great advances in the modern wine industry. The move from hand harvesting to machine harvesting has helped wineries make healthy savings, and brought more affordable plonk to our table, but is there really a quality link? Does the old fashioned way result in a noticeably better outcome, or is it just a selling tool for expensive brands?

It is argued that better quality is achieved through hand picking because there is less chance of the grape skin being damaged or the berry splitting. If left too long before processing, the damaged grapes can actually start to oxidise. As an additional advantage, leaves and stems will not find their way into the collection containers as easily.

With machine harvesting, the winery saves on labour, and in many countries it is difficult to find personnel, despite the current economic climate. Argentina is an example, largely due to seasonal complexities. Wine Sur reported how there has been a recent increase in demand for mechanical harvesting services, and the purchase of harvesting machines, by around 30%. In two of the key regions, Mendoza and San Juan, picking by hand was persisted with long after many European and US producers had already made the transition.

Nowadays, most of our everyday drinking wines and mid-range wines are being produced using the mechanical method, and in the vast majority of cases the results are every bit as good as hand picking. The management of the harvesting process is very important. Getting the grapes off the vine and into the winery quickly means the odd split grape won’t have an impact anyway. The harvest report at Château Bauduc is an interesting insight into how speed matters. As well as that, the time of the day.

For many of the top flagship wines, however, the gentler nature of hand harvesting is preferred, providing another level of selection in itself. Some don’t have a choice. For the selection of many botrytis affected grapes, manual labour is essential for the best quality. Other barriers to mechanical harvesting include geography. Our inexpensive Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc from John Marris requires hand picking as the harvesting machines cannot operate on the steep and uneven slopes of Fairhall Cliffs.

For Gavin Quinney and the team at Château Bauduc, 2009 was a tough year. Two hailstorms in May ’09 tore through vines ripping branches and destroying huge quantities of grape stock, forcing Quinney to lease a vineyard to acquire stock for his ’09 white, and unfortunately having to pull the plug on the ’09 Clos des Quinze red.

Thankfully the 2010 harvest at Château Bauduc has gone ahead with relatively few problems, apart from a spot of dryness which has affected the region as a whole. With no sign of hail, and not a single tractor bursting into flames (2009 really was a mad year!), spirits are high at Bauduc.

Here follows a bit of running commentary, reworded, but via Gavin Quinney himself, on what’s been happening over the past few weeks. It’s worth noting that this covers only a small amount of the work being done out there. With two white varieties, and three red, the harvest takes over a month to complete. Depending on grape variety, the age of the vines and the location of the vineyard, each batch will have its own optimum harvesting time, when sugar levels and acidity are just right.

White September (Sauvignon Blanc)

After some light rain early in the week, from Monday 6th to Wednesday 8th September, it was decided to pick Sauvignon Blanc grapes from 5.5 hectares of young vines planted in 2007 and 2008. When picked during sunlight hours flavour is lost, so the grapes were machine harvested during the coolest part of the day, between 5am and 9am.

The vines are very close to the winery, so it is literally minutes between the vineyard and the chilled stainless steel tanks. Most of the grapes arrived in before dawn on Friday 10th and Saturday 11th of September. After pressing the juice is allowed to settle. While the tanks warm up a little, yeast is added before a relatively cool 15˚C fermentation.

“We harvested more Sauvignon Blanc, 5am-9am on Friday & Saturday, than our entire crop of SB ‘09. Drought better than hail.” (Gavin Quinney via Tweetdeck, Mon Sept 13 2010, 08:06:06)

Red October (Merlot)

At 6am on Friday 1st October, the harvesting of 2 hectares (around 12,000 vines) of Merlot began. By 10.30am, it was all over. Again, the team didn’t hang about, with the stocks being processed within minutes of being collected. The machine harvester has an in-built ‘de-stemmer’, so when the grapes arrive at the winery a team of eight people man the sorting table, removing any rogue stalks and leaves.

Gavin Quinney would describe some wines ending up like a “lukewarm smoothie” after their grapes have been left in trailers for hours upon hours during the heat of the day. This is common practice for a Co-op, or for those ‘entry-level’ wines. Harvesting in the coolest part of the day and then transferring to the winery as soon as possible is paramount.

“From vine to trailer, to sorting conveyor, to crusher and then to tank, in a matter of minutes.” – Gavin Quinney.

Click here to view our range from Château Bauduc. You’ll have to wait just a little longer for the 2010s!

Everyone needs a human touch now and again, as Bruce Springsteen well knows. It’s the same with grapes. They need to be nurtured, protected, cared for, loved and caressed (OK, maybe caressed is going a little too far, but you get my point).

In the vineyard it is man who decides on location and aspect to the sun. It is man who manages irrigation and prunes vines to enhance concentration. And it is man who decides when it’s the right time to pick the grapes. Consistently tasting the berries and testing the sugar levels, the farmer decides on the exact day, and right time of the day, to start harvesting. The fun begins after harvest.

After all the time and work dedicated to growing the grapes, they are hand-picked or machined harvested before being placed into baskets and brought to the winery. For whites wines, white or pink grapes are used (the white Pinot Grigio, for example, is made from a pink grape of the same name). Most white wines don’t endure prolonged contact with the skins, so the grapes are crushed with the skin and juice being separated.

The juice goes into a settling tank, where the the undesirable solids sink to the bottom. When the winemaker is happy with acidity and sugar levels, the juice is ready for fermentation. This is the stage that the natural sugars in the fruit juice are converted to alcohol.

Typically white wine is fermented between 18-20 degrees centigrade in the Old World (Europe), and 12-17 degrees in New World countries (the Americas, South Africa, Australia, etc.) where there is a greater determination for fruit. Fermentation can last for anything from a few days to a few weeks depending largely on the temperature.

Red wine is fermented at higher temperatures (typically 25-30 degrees C), and as a result tends to occur more rapidly (usually 3-7 days). Red wine is made exclusively from red or black grapes as its the skins that give the wine its rich colour. Depending on the grape and the type of wine desired by the winemaker, the skins are left in contact with the juice during the fermentation process. More contact means more colour and richness, but can also mean more astringency (you know, the harsh, puckering taste you might experience in cheap or wines that need ageing?), so the balance is essential to getting the structure of the wine right.

After fermentation, both red and white wines are clarified to remove any remaining skins or other solids, and left to rest in steel or oak tanks. Much wine these days (in the particular the volume supermarket stuff) is bottled very soon after to provide quick sale and cash-flow for the wine-maker. Other wine is held back for ageing to develop more complex flavours. This is particularly true for wines aged in oak.

Some grapes suit ageing better than others. Most reds will benefit from some, and in the whites the likes of Chardonnay and Riesling are quite capable of lengthy ageing processes, particularly in the bottle.

So, the year of vintage printed on the bottle now gives you an indication of the type of wine you should expect to taste. The vintage is the year the grapes were harvested and the wine made. So a 2008 Sauvignon Blanc should be crisp, clean and straightforward, with lots of fruit to the fore, whereas a 1998 Chablis (made from Chardonnay) is going to be more complex, less fruity but with other complexities like yeast, or spice, or even a creaminess to the texture.

Happy, and more knowledgeable, wine-drinking this weekend.