Alien Invasion

The other night, I was driving home from class around midnight and saw intensely bright and somewhat eerie lights throughout vineyards as I passed. Hulking machinery, which vaguely resembles alien space craft, lumbered through rows of vines, and tiny tractors pulling huge bins wove in and out. Extra-terrestrial invasion? Nope, just vineyards picking their grapes by machine.

While hand harvesting grapes is all around better, most large scale production wineries use machines to harvest their grapes. It's not as delicate, but it doesn't really matter because the fruit that is picked goes into lower priced wines. (It costs about $55 per acre to pick by machine, compared to over $350 per acre to do it by hand, so the math speaks for itself.) At Riverbench, we pick the fruit for our wines by hand, but for one of our vineyard clients, machine harvesting is it.

Picking by machines is done at night because it's cooler, and nobody wants a hot bin of grapes. They have high beam lights to make sure everything is illuminated, so it really does give the impression, at least from far away, that alien craft might be landing in the vineyard.

Craving my own alien encounter, I ventured out for a night picking experience. Earlier that day, Jim showed me every part of the machine up close so that I would understand what would happen and how it would work. It's hard to explain, but you can see by the pictures that the machine is pulled over each row, and the arms inside shake the vines to remove the grapes. These are then pulled by a conveyor belt into a gondola a few rows over, which collects the fruit. I don't mean to romanticize something that is rather aggressive on the vines, but the machinery is astounding. All those moving parts! Additionally, those guys driving the heavy machinery in pitch black dark perfectly? Stupefying. I can't even parallel park.

Jim and I followed along behind the machine to make sure it was picking right. It's a ton of walking, and dust, leaves, grape matter, and who knows what else completely covered us after just a few minutes. It was cold, but we were walking so much I didn't feel it. Riding on top of the machine was pretty killer, too; you can see every working part. Being about 10 feet up in the air is kind of empowering, too, especially for someone 5 feet tall. It was an adrenaline rush, and probably one of the coolest things I got to do this harvest.

Afterwards, we had a little while to just chill and wait for the fruit to come in, so me, Jim, and Raul, one of the foremen, watched the stars, talking about everything from beers to grapes to families to beers. And the aliens...well, they were probably up there just laughing at us.