Picking for Premium Quality

In the early days of the premium wine industry, mechanical harvesters got a bad rap. That's about to change. In fact, around Rainbow, we're predicting that, in the years ahead, winemakers will be asking for mechanically harvested grapes.

With a new focus on producing a premium product, technologically advanced mechanical harvesters can now deliver grapes that show less fruit damage than hand-picked grapes, and much fewer stems and leaves than older harvesters.

Understanding a little harvester history will go a long way to helping you understand how and why this transformation is occurring.

Originally designed to service the large vines and high-tonnage vineyards of California's Central Valley and New York's Concord grape industry, early harvesters did not deliver a quality product. Tonnage was the driving factor. Simply put, more grapes meant more money.

But, in faraway places, mechanical harvesting was generating serious interest. Both in France and in Australia, a lack of a ready labor pool made the idea of mechanical harvesting very attractive. In both these places, vineyards could not expand because there would be no one to pick the grapes.

The French wine industry, of course, is devoted to quality, much like North Coast growers and winemakers. Arriving abroad, harvesting technology underwent further development beneath the winemakers' watchful eyes. Now France is producing some of the best machines on the market; tools capable of moving into the field at a moment's notice, the minute the grapes have achieved perfection, and winemakers are pleased with the result.

Increasingly, area winemakers and grape buyers are coming to understand that their old prejudice against machine-harvested fruit is unfounded. Hand-picked grapes come in bunches, but machine-picked loads are just the grapes. Because machine-harvested grapes have much less contact with stems and leaves, their juice has a purer taste and, in this industry, taste is everything.

See our online flyer of the Gregoire Grape Harvester, available now at Rainbow Ag. Learn more at the Gregoire California website.