Saturday, October 11, 2008

Picking Pinot Gris

Every vineyard is run a little differently. At most places my picking boxes are spread out into the rows beneath the vines, the pickers fill them, and then other workers come behind with a tractor and load the full boxes onto pallets, and from there onto the truck. At Chuck Suggett's Willamette Valley vineyard, the pickers pick into five-gallon buckets, which they then carry to the end of the row (at a run) and dump, receiving a punch on their picking card for each bucket picked, and at the end of the day they are paid by the bucket. On most days they are dumping into half-ton bins, and a lot of the grapes are going to get smooshed anyway, so they're not always very careful. In my case, we spread out yellow picking boxes at the ends of the rows and they dump one bucket per box, in order to keep all the grapes intact until they are crushed at the winery. Last year I observed that some pickers were being less gentle than others in their dumping, so I inquired how to say "carefully" in Spanish. So this year, the same crew chief is explaining to the pickers in rapid-fire Spanish how the system works, and when he's done he turns to me and says "Right??". "Si...con cuidado," I reply, in my very best accent, with D's verging unto TH's. He looks at me like I've just stepped out of a UFO, pauses, and says softly "si, con cuidado!"

The great thing about this picking system is that it allows for many pickers to work simultaneously, and the picking gets done fast. Plus, the vineyard is on a pretty good slope, which I back the truck up, so that when we're loading in the boxes, they will pretty much slide all the way to the front if given a good push, making loading fast and easy.

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