The Grape Harvest
There's a 'sea' of vines in the Midi and the grapes must be harvested.
When
the grapes are ripe, usually in mid-September, the harvest begins. There are
still some examples of hand picking but we saw very few teams of pickers this
trip.
A small operation might just fill buckets like this to be taken to the wine
co-op but we saw only a couple of examples of this. Mostly, even if they were
picking by hand, they'd fill bigger wagons like the one below.
Most
vineyards were picked by mechanical pickers like the one at work at left. The
picker straddles the row of vines and the rubberized bars you can see on the
right vibrate and vigorously shake the vine causing the ripe grapes to fall to
the conveyer cups below. These cups carry the grapes up to the hoppers where
they dump them. Unlike the hand picked grapes where the picker cuts the entire
bunch of grapes off the vine, stems (and sometimes leaves) and all, the
mechanical picker mostly takes just the individual grapes. I was told that they are 95%
efficient. When the hoppers are full the machine dumps them into the wagon for
transport to the co-op, as you see below.
The
tractors back up in turn to the bins and dump their load. The load gets weighed
and an auger in the bottom of the bin turns to drive the grapes and juice (and
stems and leaves) into a drum behind the bin. The juice and individual grapes
fall through a grid in the bottom of the drum into vats as the mixture tumbles.
The stems and leaves are pushed out the end of the drum.
A
conveyer takes this debris to a "last chance" drum where any grapes
still stuck to the stems may yet be loosened and recovered. The stems and leaves
are dumped into a wagon for disposal. The grapes and juice that collected in the
vats are pumped into the presses to extract the grape juice.
Once all the juice has been
extracted by the presses and pumped into the fermentation tanks the tightly
packed cakes of seeds and skins (and occasional bit of stem) are extruded out of
the presses and taken away for disposal.