Riding a Machine Harvester

harvester-cab-bella.jpg

View from the cab

Thursday I had the good luck to ride on a wine grape harvester. There's room only for the driver in the cab so I hung on to a grab bar standing on a small ledge outside the cabin.

The harvester travels at around 2km (1.25 miles) per hour straddling a row. Grapes go on a conveyor belt that crosses over the next row to drop in a trailer towed by a tractor in the next aisle.

The trailer has two compartments and the driver is signalling the tractor to pull forward so the grapes drop in the rear compartment as the front one is now full.

When both are full the tractor goes off to get an empty trailer and the harvester drops the grapes into an onboard compartment so it doesn't have to stop. The driver, Philip Viljoen, started at 3am and if nothing goes wrong will continue to 5pm. He has two days to pick his 8ha vineyard before the sugar level rises past the level he will get premium rating for them at the winery.

harvester-front-bella.jpg

The harvester lowers on one side so that the driver (and me) can reach the metal ladder down its side.

It was a fun ride!

harvester-back-bella.jpg

Thanks to Philip Viljoen, owner of Oubenheim Wine Estate and Len Knoetze, Production Manager at Namaqua Wines, Olifants River, Western Cape, South Africa

Nice Peter! I see them around my area, usually picking Concord and Niagara for Welches. I believe most of the premium wine grapes are hand harvested.

We were lucky to see a grape vine planter a couple of years ago while visiting in the Finger Lakes. Apparantely according to the vineyard owner, a Canadian outfit owns and runs the thing. It starts in Florida every year and works its way back to Niagara. It plants vines of any reasonably height at any desired interval. Well worth the money to rent it!

By what method are the grapes removed from the vine - shaking, pulling or what?

By what method are the grapes removed from the vine - shaking, pulling or what?

Most have paddle like objects that shake the vine, causing ripe grapes to fall onto a belt, which conveys the grapes to a big bin. Along with various twigs, leaves and snakes. Proponents claim the newest machines are gentler, allow quick picking at the optimal time. The grapes are destemmed and obvously not sorted, so if you want to ferment with stems you are out of luck.

Hopefully the “paddles” which cause the vines to “shake and vibrate violently” are “hitting the vine at the “fruiting zone” or just “slightly above it” (whole clusters themselves not taking “direct hits”). As Joe stated surely single berries could separate from cluster but I would expect a lot of full “ripe cluster” (stem and all) to be gathered as well (with some MOG (matter other than grape).

Hi Peter, Sounds like something I would enjoy doing! (But I doubt the vineyard owners or sub contracted harvesting company would let me).

Salute

Sue and I rode a harvester for two rows at Katnook Estate in the Coonawarra many years ago. Then the harvester split a hydraulic pipe and had to stop for repairs. I think we then went back to the winery with the wine maker to taste some wine. It was fun. Have some pictures floating around somewhere.

The harvester has a row of long curved horizontal plastic (or fibreglass, I don't know which) rods which vibrate the row.

Mostly individual berries come off, sometimes whole bunches. Here is pic of a stem after the harvester passed.

stalk-after-harvest.jpg

Yes, MOG gets in the hopper, but not many leaves -- I didn't see any in the hopper -- I think there's a blower that removes them.

The winery does sorting and uses a large electromagnet to remove any metal items, sometimes staples holding trellis wires come off, and this vineyard being harvested had a snail infestation so those will also be removed at the winery at sorting.

Regarding quality of hand versus machine harvesting -- now thats a thing us wine geeks can discuss to the cows come home.

My own opinion is that the method doesn't matter -- what is important is berry selection at the winery.

You could argue that machine harvesting isn't as gentle as hand harvesting -- but those hand cut bunches then go into a destemmer machine and that treatment isn't any more gentle than the harvester.

Some people say that hand harvesters apply judgement about whiich bunches to select -- and that is true in some places. But the reality in most is that harvesting grapes is backbreaking and physically very hard and uncomfortable work, lowly paid and often paid by result - i.e. by weight of grapes or amount of baskets picked and the picker puts everything in the basket.

On the quality front, Philip said the only way he could pick his vineyard in the time window available for grape perfection was by machine, left any longer and the sugar levels would have gone too high.

Over the last decade or so there have been big strides made in developing a gentler Machine Harvester. That said, they are still much more aggressive than hand harvesting and really shouldn’t be employed for the highest quality wines. But, for some wines styles and quality levels, they are completely adequate. You can still do a run through the vineyard with humans to remove rotten or un-ripe berries before machine harvesting - faster than hand harvesting, though obviously the cost of a pre-harvest run starts to creep in the direction of a full hand harvest. Machine harvested grapes get squashed and ruptured leading to oxidation and despite leaf blowers having been incorporated into the design, a significant amount of leaves and other debris will be found in the hopper. If you can live with that (or prefer a little skin maceration anyway), then machine harvesting is much cheaper than sending a crew out. For whole-cluster pressing, Machine Harvesting is not a safe option.

Damage can also be done to stakes, wires, and even the stocks and canes. One of the biggest drawbacks is that those bastards are heavy. A couple of runs through a row will greatly compact the soil leading to water-drainage, soil-aeration problems, and ultimately a colder soil –not good for ripening grapes, the vine-roots, and soil flora and fauna.

Cheers,
Bill

Machine harvested grapes get squashed and ruptured leading to oxidation and despite leaf blowers having been incorporated into the design, a significant amount of leaves and other debris will be found in the hopper.

This reminds me of a remark made to me by the late Jean Jouffreau of Ch.du Cayrou at Cahors when discussing mechanical harvesting. "If you want lizards and snakes in your wine, then mechanical harvesting is perfect." This was said in a delightfully thick French south-western accent which made "serpent" (snake) rhyme with "vin" and has stuck in my memory.

wrt machine harvesting, I recall that Wynns argument in going back to hand-harvesting wasn't the quality of the grapes harvested that vintage per se, but the long term damage it did to the vines. Now over time I'm sure machines will get better and better in this respect, but as long as it's shaking that does the job, it won't ever be as gentle as a human - even a knackered & sore one!

I personally prefer machine harvested fruit, all other things being equal, if the harvester is a rail shaker type. Pivotal strikers tend to juice fruit and take off more of the marginal fruit, beating the clusters to beat the grapes off. But rail shakers, are not really hard on the vines, because they are typically used on vines with woody structural components. Ripe fruit is shaken off, while raisins and unripe fruit typically remain on the vine. Note that there are times, such as with rotten fruit, where hand harvesting becomes an absolute must. But for the majority of times, you get more for your money with mechanically harvested fruit, free from rachises, and largely free from other vegetable MOG. But the gross part is the mice, lizards, snakes and other things that get included. Well, they climb into the bins of hand harvested fruit, too, but typically not that many as the machine harvested. And of course, one must deal with the occasional machine screws, sprinkler heads and other metal bits that can screw up a crusher/stemmer or must pump. Most growers, though, take steps to keep their trellises and irrigation systems from being destroyed. Again, the bottom line to wineries is higher yields (for the same or lower prices) of higher quality fruit.

OK, here's a photo, taken from the rear, of the rods that do the shaking and the converyor belt below that catches the grapes.

harvester-rods.jpg

I spoke yesterday with another viticulturist, who manages an American owned wine farm, about the concerns raised in this thread.

He harvests some vineyards with machine and some by hand.

The rods are not supposed to hit the bunches but to shake the vines so the grapes come off. The trellissing and canopy management has to be done with harvesting in mind, and the harvester has to be adjusted for each vineyard and each cultivar.

Soil compression: Its no different to the tractors used for spraying, weed management etc. But you can't (or he doesn't) use the harvester on all soil types; his vineyards on rocky shale are ok, on soft sandy soil he wouldn't.

Cultivars: some are not suitable for machine harvesting - ones that are have thick skins that easily separate from stalk

Oxygen exposure: not much and not a problem with red cultivars that need some oxygen.

Leaves and MOG: he says the fans on the harvester remove them (if properly adjusted) and he gets fewere leaves than with hand harvested.

What he particularly likes about the machine is they can harvest in the dark, starting 3am when grapes are at their coldest and get the crop into the winery cold.

The farm grows grapes for some top wineries including Bruce Jack's Flagstone (Writers Block, Dark Horse, Music Room and Word of Mouth labels), Guardian Peak and Rust en Vrede. Their own Lions Drift label is on American Airlines Business Class,

Leaves and MOG: he says the fans on the harvester remove them (if properly adjusted) and he gets fewere leaves than with hand harvested.

I have done a little hand harvesting, an am mystified as to how other hand harvester would pick leaves and put them into the bins. You just hold a bunch of grapes with one hand and snip the stem with the snips in the other hand hand, then drop it into the bin. No leaves are touched.

Leaves and MOG: he says the fans on the harvester remove them (if properly adjusted) and he gets fewere leaves than with hand harvested.

I have done a little hand harvesting, an am mystified as to how other hand harvester would pick leaves and put them into the bins. You just hold a bunch of grapes with one hand and snip the stem with the snips in the other hand hand, then drop it into the bin. No leaves are touched.

OTOH, I saw plenty of leaves, and a few frogs (no snakes) go straight into the crusher at Katnook.

Soil compression: Its no different to the tractors used for spraying, weed management etc. But you can't (or he doesn't) use the harvester on all soil types; his vineyards on rocky shale are ok, on soft sandy soil he wouldn't.

I don’t know what kind of tractors they use for spraying in SA or how wide the row spacing is, but I can tell you that a Machine harvester loaded with 3000 liters of wine weighs about 22,000 lbs, and the very largest tractors used in Germany for Wine weigh about 5,500 lbs. (small enough to drive in the ~2m rows.) Practices at the moment overwhelmingly favor grass-cover in every other row, and open, loose, warm soil (planted with nitrogen-fixing legumes, raps, or other deep-rooted wild flowers, beans etc.) in the others. In those open rows no one drives even small tractors for fear of soil-compaction, but Machine harvesters obviously drive in both lanes to straddle the vines and absolutely compact the soil –especially clay.

Another disadvantage is that machine harvesters can only really drive up to a 20% slope, while Germany has vineyards of more than 170% in steepness.
The climate here also dictates that more sorting be done in the vineyard before harvest than in other, warmer, drier countries where botrytis is of less concern. –So, different strategies for different places around the world.

Cheers,
Bill

I have done a little hand harvesting, an am mystified as to how other hand harvester would pick leaves and put them into the bins. You just hold a bunch of grapes with one hand and snip the stem with the snips in the other hand hand, then drop it into the bin. No leaves are touched.

In principle you're right, Neil; if each bunch were snipped with loving care then you'd get no leaves. Having a few times participated in the process in California, I can say that loving care is often not the reality. Picking crews are sometimes hired on fixed price contracts rather than by the man-hour; so much to harvest a given vineyard, for example. Time is money, as they say, and speed is rewarded; get finished with that vineyard and move on to another. Also, September days can still be hot in inland California and for quality purposes (not to mention comfort of the crew), picking often starts at dawn and wants to conclude before the day starts heating up. Again, there is incentive to pick quickly. For speed, the picking tool of choice is not clippers but a curved knive (which probably has a name) designed for grape harvesting. Stems other than the one supporting a bunch occastionally get cut and leaves end up mixed with the fruit along with spiders and insects. Not so many vertebrates in my limited experience

Mark wrote:
“For speed, the picking tool of choice is not clippers but curved knives (which probably has a name) designed for grape harvesting.”

Miniature Billhook knives (the blade could also be serrated in certain areas of the blade). (One not so accurate swipe of this blade (especially if it is “sharp”) could do quite some damage to the vine, cutting more than just stems). The crews they get to hand harvest the vineyards in my area are quite “comfortable” (“accurate”) and fast with these tools. (Still like Mark stated you could find whole leaves or parts of leaves or small pieces of “wood” and quite a few spiders and insects).

Salute