🍷 Grape picker

A grape picker (vendangeur in French) is a person who cuts bunches from the vine at harvest. The work lasts a few weeks: in Champagne the harvest usually runs about three weeks, and everything is picked by hand. Pickers cut with shears, drop the bunches into buckets or crates and tip them into larger bins.

In Champagne nearly a hundred thousand people turn out, three or four per hectare. The date is not guessed. Volunteer growers in the matu network, active since 1955, track acidity and sugar for each variety and each cru. The bunches go to the press whole, so the juice never touches skins, stalks or seeds. That is how white wine is made from black grapes.

What it looks like on the ground comes through in a US university guide for small growers. Pickers fill buckets or plastic lugs, then empty them into bins that hold up to about 450 kilograms. One person picks between 136 and 227 kilograms a day. After rain you wait a day or two for the bunches to dry, and you pick gently, because crushed berries yield less juice.

Machines are a different story. In California about 90 per cent of wine grapes are harvested by machine, because hand picking costs 10 to 20 times more. Hands stay on steep slopes where machines cannot work, and at estates whose makers of expensive wines insist on it. So hand picking is not everywhere, and that is simply how it is.

Next time you open a bottle of Champagne, think of those hundred thousand people bent over the rows for three weeks. For the method itself see Hand harvesting, and for the wider trade see Professions in the world of wine.