Whether you’re harvesting your vineyard by hand, machine, or a combination of both, thorough preparation is key to a successful harvest.
Canopy Management: Start with the basics. Ensure all canes are tucked in, wires are clipped, and the fruit zone foliage is stripped on both sides. At this stage, only pickable fruit should remain on the vine.
Ground Maintenance: Maintain a weed-free under-vine strip to allow crates of fruit to be placed underneath, preventing premature pressing by tractors. Additionally, mow the alleyways to facilitate easier movement.
Planning and Coordination: Discuss your yield estimations with your winemaker to decide on a harvest date. Book your picking teams, winery space, and transport well in advance. Synchronising your pickers/machine harvester, winery, and logistics is crucial to ensure everything aligns on the same days. Regular updates, cooperation, and flexibility are essential.
Managing Multiple Sites: Coordinate picks at multiple sites, each with unique challenges, and align them with limited grape press availability, variable English weather, labour constraints, machinery issues, fruit ripeness, disease pressure, and insect threats.
Hand-Harvesting Considerations: Remember that picking a small bunch takes as long as a large one. Plan for around 50 kg of fruit picked per person per hour when deciding how many pickers to source.
Picking Essentials:
- Picking crates: Ensure enough crates for two days of picking, laid out under the vines the day before. Consider size, ease of handling, load capacity, maneuverability, stacking ability, and ease of cleaning.
- Secateurs: Sharp, clean, and numbered. One pair per picker plus spares.
- Buckets: Standard 15-25L plastic buckets with handles. One per picker plus spares.
- Disposable gloves: Blue, food grade.
- Boxes of plasters: Blue, food grade.
Collecting (Ground Crew): You’ll need a team of three: one tractor driver and two for collecting crates. Plan for one team per six tons per day, depending on ground conditions, crate sizes, trailer size, row length, and distance to the loading area.
- Tractor: Fuelled and serviced.
- Trailer: Tailgate dropped where possible.
- Gloves
Palletising:
- Pallets: 300-500 kg of fruit per pallet. Discard any pallets that cannot be lifted using a pallet truck.
- Pallet wrap
- Labels/permanent markers
- Scales to calculate average weights
- Logbook
- Pallet truck/forklift
Loading and Transport:
- Forklift or other means of loading a lorry
- Lorry plus driver for transport to the winery
- CAD documents with every load – to be given to the winery/buyer
While the coordination of harvest activities is complex, by being prepared and making thoughtful decisions about equipment, logistics, and capabilities, you can look forward to a successful harvest.
By Chris Buckley, Business Director of VineWorks. At VineWorks, we support our clients by providing relevant, up-to-date, expert advice at every stage of their vineyard’s life, one vine at a time.