One of the pickers at Clos Apalta

Good Morning!

The next phase of my apprenticeship started in the vineyard. I would work with the picking crews. I did not pick grapes, I would have loved to try to pick for a few days but honestly, there is a true art to picking and these men and women have a true talent. This is back breaking, tedious work and they go at full speed for hours and hours with no stopping. They start at the moment light of the morning starts to come out. It is normally around 5 AM.

We were at the Clos Apalta vineyards and the winery is located at the top of the hill. So literally, as the grapes are getting picked they are being taken straight up to the winery to be processed. (I will go into the process at the winery in tomorrow). The Clos Apalta vineyard is cradled by huge hills and the sun does not hit the actual vines until 9:30 – 10:00 AM at this time of the year. The mornings are cool and by the time the sun starts to hit the grapes and your back you finally warm up a bit.

The man who is leads all the vineyards of Clos Apalta is Jorge Castillo and he has been there for 20 plus years. Everything in the vineyard is done by hand. It is very hilly and beautiful. A few things to keep in mind, the vineyard is bio-dynamic, they compost EVERYTHING for fertilizing during the off season and this is the premier vineyards for the wines Clos Apalta and BO RO BO. These wines are award winning and fantastic. The Clos Apalta was the number 1 wine in Wine Spectator just a couple of years ago.

To create such an amazing wine you can not cut corners. So when I watched the speed, care and accuracy of these pickers I was beyond impressed. Also, I had to keep in mind these workers are paid by how many bins of grapes they pick each day. They could have just ripped the grapes off and get them into bins and hurry and not care about quality. But these folks from Chile are proud and they don’t think the way many folks who are paid by volume naturally think.

So, some of my job in the vineyard was to work with the pickers and make sure they get the credit for each bin. How they have done this for years is a person stands at the end of each block of vines and when they bring a full bin of grapes they bring them to the end of the row and then I would hand them a plastic chip and they would put the chip into their pocket and at the end of the day they cash in the chips for their pay in cash. They called the chip a feacha (I am sure I a spelling this wrong) but it sounds like the word “feature” but said with a hard Chilean accent. And my job was called the Feachara, (this is also spelled wrong, but I can not find it anywhere on Google) the person who passes out the chips and hails down the trucks that bring the empty bins and would also pick up the freshly picked grapes. I would cover about 30 rows of pickers and each picker had a different approach, some would fill many bins and then bring them to the end of the row all at once and some would bring them after each bin was full.

These bins are heavy, sticky and this is manual labor at it’s core. They are hunched over for hours, in the cold mornings, then the sun comes out and it is hot. They can only pick until about 1:30 or 2:00 PM, it becomes too hot for the grapes to be picked. They work 6 days a week and they are happy and focused on their picking. They yell and laugh and pump each other up and cheer for a minute when they move to different blocks. The days I worked with them we picked Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Carmenere grapes.

The next phase for these grapes are to take a ride up the hill and into the sorting tables and the process of hand de-stemming grapes for hours. I will discuss this process on tomorrow’s blog!

Much LOVE and wine,

Tammi

These are the chips I would give to each picker for each full bin of grapes they picked.