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 its solution.
One strategy is the sort that bases judgment on our sensory perceptions. In this approach, the degree to which one finds pleasure in the scents, flavors, and feel of a wine will be the sole, true measure of its quality.
The drawback to this method is its inherent subjectivity. Not only do we frequently not agree with each other with respect to what is pleasing; we may not even agree with ourselves, since aspects we find appealing at first taste may become tiresome after a glass or two. Abruptly, our judgment takes a turn. This has been your correspondent’s experience more times than he is comfortable admitting to.
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 objective facts rather than personal impressions. There’s a relatively short list of factors that are generally understood to build quality in wine. Among these we might count (a) a proven site with living soils, (b) a beneficial exposition resulting in (c) modest yields of (d) healthy, ripe, hand-harvested fruit.
Retailers and sommeliers routinely regale customers with talk touting these factors, as testimony that the wine in question is, at the least, well and properly made. Each of these elements has what might be called spin-off effects that merit individual treatment, but none may be more wide-ranging than harvesting by hand.
Routine before the 1960’s (per above), manual harvests became less so as machinery was developed to effectively shake or beat fruit from vines and as skilled harvest labor, once abundant and cheap, became legally and logistically more complicated and expensive.
As proof of the efficiency of picking by machine, consider that while the old way 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.
Moreover, a machine doesn’t need to be either housed or fed and can be brought out, eager and uncomplaining, at just the right moment. Machines aren’t known to start the day with a hangover, be caught in flagrante among the vines, or pitch a fit. A moment of silence, please, for the tedious, friendless, sexless life of the harvesting machine.
Machine picking makes most sense for larger-scale operations on fairly level ground where quality may not be the primary concern. Machines aren’t capable of the fine discrimination needed to triage healthy fruit from ill (or fully-ripe from not-quite) and many grapes collected this way suffer damage in the process — the kind that may require sulfur additions and extra cellar work to remediate.
By itself, hand harvests alone can’t guarantee quality, but in those places where a grower can opt for either robotic or human agency, the choice of the latter is a strong indicator of a sincere commitment to the integrity of the raw materials and the quality of the final product. Sex and hangovers be damned.