What makes a wine good, better or even best? It’s a challenging question and one that admits not only of multiple answers, but of more than one approach to drawing a conclusion.One strategy links judgment to our sensory perceptions — the degree to which one finds the scents, flavors, and feel of a wine pleasing providing one set of benchmarks by which to measure quality. The drawback to this method is its subjectivity. Not only may we not agree with others with respect to what is pleasing — either generally or particularly. We may not even agree with ourselves. Features we find attractive at first taste may become tiresome after glass two or three, prompting a mid-bottle correction.
One means of escape from the traps set by subjectivity is to focus our attention on production values. Here, we seem on firmer ground, since we’re dealing with facts rather than ephemeral impressions. There’s a short list of elements that are generally understood to build quality in wine. Among these are a proven site with living soils and a beneficial exposition resulting in modest yields of healthy, ripe fruit which are harvested by hand.
Retailers and sommeliers routinely regale customers with talk that highlights these features, as testimony that the wine in question is fundamentally well and properly made. Each of these elements has what one might call spin-off effects that with more space at our disposal would merit individual treatment. But none may be as telling, on its own, than the harvesting of fruit the old-fashioned way: by human hands.
Routine everywhere before the 1960’s, the manual picking of whole, individual grape bunches with the aid of a kind of hooked knife or heavy-duty shears became less common after machinery that violently shook or beat berries from their vines became available and affordable.
What was the appeal? Well, consider that while manual harvesting requires between one and ten days of per-person labor per hectare (2.4 acres) to accomplish, machines — where they are legal and the topography permits– can do the same work in less than five hours, without any of the HR hassles.
Machine picking makes most sense for large-scale operations on relatively flat terrain where quality may not be the primary concern. Robots aren’t capable of the fine discrimination needed to triage good grapes from bad (or fully ripe from not quite) and many berries collected by machine will suffer some damage – the kind that it can take lots of sulfur dioxide and cellar work to remediate.
By itself, a manual harvest doesn’t guarantee quality, but in those places where a grower has the right to opt for either mechanized or human agency, the choice of the latter is a strong indicator of a serious commitment to the integrity of the raw materials and the quality of the final product.