I Love Harvest!

I love harvest. Probably more than I should given how tough it can be, but every year I leave a young family and travel more than 1000 miles to get there so it’s a good thing I do. I always feel like it gets a bit of a raw deal in the media though. Everything is dominated by instant gratification click bait and formulaic vintage reports. There’s no soul, there’s no passion and harvest is absolutely bursting with both. I appreciate these are intangible, ethereal emotions but without them no combination of perfect terroir and temperate summers will ever result in a perfect wine. There is magic in the wineries during harvest, and I want more people to know about it.

It’s hard work, but I love it!

I’m writing this during the northern hemisphere harvest when wine media is saturated with endless photos of good-looking people in good-looking places wearing utterly inappropriate clothing for the task at hand. It’s easy to mock (and I frequently do) but it’s honestly not the photogenic lavender-field-fakery that annoys me. I can at least understand the social media socialite world even if I don’t want to fully embrace it. It’s the fact that everyone misses out on what makes working a harvest truly special. Rocking up in a region and picking a few grapes in your pristine Le Chameau wellies, with your brand-new Niwaki secateurs and wearing something white (there’s always someone wearing white) is all well and good but your sanitised visit bears no relation to what’s going on inside the winery.

They’re not alone. Every wine journalist will be sardonically lambasting that stock photo of hands holding grapes whilst simultaneously publishing a veritable bingo card of vineyard photos. Leathery faced pickers, check. Sunrises over green crested vineyards, check. Grapes in either slow-motion or hyper speed, check. Any articles will focus on frost events, rainfall, growing degree days and exhaustive accounts of regional soil variations. All well written, well researched, beautifully lit, carefully edited, lovely stuff. But all fully predictable and almost none of it bears any relation to what is actually going on in the winery at harvest.

Team work makes the dream work.

I’ll accept all this promo is completely necessary. I know how the game works. This is the time of year when the most action happens, when the day is filled with photo ops. As brands we must make the most of our peak desirability, so harvest is always going to be an arms race of promotion and content creation. Let’s face it, I can’t imagine people queueing up to volunteer during the fallow months. Anyone up for a day of cleaning barrels, running lab tests or, heaven forbid, a day of bottling?! So what’s my problem? Why am I so frustrated? It’s not that harvest brings all this attention to wineries. It’s a huge boost to Paso’s coverage when I can start posting videos of me doing interesting work instead of wracking my brains for something new to say. It’s also not (entirely) my jealousy of the beautiful people travelling to beautiful parts of the world for photo shoots glamourising the kind of work which is responsible for my prematurely aged back. No, it’s that they come in for a day and miss the best bit. Ok, they might have lunch in the vines and a tasting of heritage vintages from bottles with a surprisingly perfect coating of dust. But they haven’t experienced the intoxicating joy of working flat out in the cellar, returning day after day to make something you’ve poured a bit of your soul into, with a team of people that momentarily become closer than family. It’s an atmosphere that I have become completely addicted to and I think everyone who loves wine enough to make it their profession should do everything they can to experience it. This is where wines are realised and when you appreciate the effort that goes into every bottle, it will enhance every wine you drink from that point on.

I should throw some caveats out there and say my love affair with harvest is almost entirely predicated on working at small wineries. I know people who have travelled to the most spectacular regions only to work 12 hour rolling shifts on the rotary vacuum filter. Nobody is falling in love with that. My own harvest exploits have mostly been in wineries where you can count the team on one hand and during the rest of the year you barely need that. For me, that is where the magic happens. The building of excitement and expectation throughout the year reaches its crescendo when new people come into the cellar. Maybe they are completely new and only here for harvest or maybe they are colleagues who are usually focused on other parts of the business. Either way a team is born and over the next few weeks, for good and for bad they are with you, side by side. They are there through the long hours, the wet feet, the endless cleaning, and the excruciating logistics as you attempt to find a home for an unexpected 1500L at 2am in the morning. They are there for the bleary-eyed morning coffees and the wide-eyed reactions to someone’s inexplicable choice of winery music (no ballads, I cannot stress this enough!). They share in the moments of joy as wines you’ve got high hopes for are even better than expected and they share in the calamities as presses get rolled with open doors and tanks overflow (both happened this year, no amount of experience makes you immune). And they share in the life affirming team meals and the post work beer. A moment of such unbridled satisfaction that this may be the single best part of harvest. A righteous pint. A shared pressure relief valve that makes the next day seem possible and the weight of the last week momentarily disappear.

The calm before the storm.

For two glorious months at the end of summer I get to work with my wines. I get to shape them and push the portfolio to where I want it to be. I can get my hands dirty and capitalise on the success of previous vintages or take new approaches with new varieties and new techniques. It’s my fuel for the next 10 months and gives me the belief I need in myself to stand up and talk about our wines with pride.

It is horribly cliched, but every bottle of Paso has a story to tell. Each new vintage of our wines has a shared experience, a moment in time, something that makes it stand out in the memory and a lot of these are forged in the cellar. Jetting in to take photos in the vineyards or on the sorting table may be ‘good for the ‘gram’ but it doesn’t capture the soul of working in a winery. No amount of beautiful vistas can explain why people put their lives on hold to turn grapes into wine. People get paid so there’s always some who treat it the same as any other job but I’m part of the wave of folks who got into the wine industry for the love of it and found their home in the cellar. And while I would love to visit more regions and taste more wines there is nothing that will ever come close to working in a cellar during harvest. Making something you’re incredibly proud of is always satisfying but doing it as part of a team when you only get one shot at it every year? That is truly special.