Harvesting Grapes for Wine

I recently had my first opportunity to pick grapes--we were visiting a friend of a friend's 6 acre personal hobby vineyard--which sounds like it might be a modest place, but it is not. We harvested almost 1/2 a ton of grapes and only did about an 1/8 of an acre worth of harvesting. So six acres can produce a prodigious amount of wine--certainly more than one could drink between seasons. The vineyards were wonderfully kept--which clearly takes a monumental amount of time, and begs the question of the fine line between a hobby and a job.

I learned two important lessons from my afternoon in the fields. The first is that while I wasn't terrible at harvesting grapes, I wasn't going to make a living doing it. I had comfortable shoes, sunscreen, and large hat, and good equipment, but I definitely was not speedy. I also did not have enough water, which I really should have known better about. The corollary to this lesson is that they are not charging nearly enough for wine.  It reminded me of the time I took a basket weaving class at a local museum. We made what has to be the easiest basket design available, and used weaving material that had been gathered and prepared prior to the class--so we did not even procure our raw materials--and yet I came home with a half finished basket and a firm belief that baskets were far too cheap considering the workmanship that goes into them.   Such was the lesson I learned when picking wine grapes. 

The second lesson that I learned is that wine grapes at harvest taste delicious. We picked Syrah, Gewürztraminer, and Villard Blanc grapes--the Gewürztraminer in particular tasted impossibly sweet and vaguely like the wine that it eventually produces. The experience in the fields made we want to do something that I have never wanted to do before--take a class at UC Davis. It is slightly inconvenient now that I live 2,000 miles away rather than 200, but it would be great fun to learn more about this entire process.