Grapepicking and harvest

The Vendimia celebrations are over, the weather is cooling down and the leaves are turning brown – for many of us this becomes a time to look to hibernation and relaxing after a busy Summer, but for the vineyards this is the busiest time of the year: harvest.

Paintings of deep burgundy and green and old photos of land workers plucking at the vines spring to mind when you think of the harvest and this romantic image is not too far from the truth. The vineyards are beautiful and the sun creates a sullen golden glow, but don’t let any Russell Crowe movie lead you to believe that wine making is effortless.

Hundreds of grape pickers flock to Mendoza to work the season pulling at the year’s bounty on the vines. They work long, hard hours and are usually poorly paid, earning an average of around two pesos per bucket of grapes. And these buckets are very big and very heavy.

However I, like many wine drinkers, still hold onto a fairytale fantasy of doing a day’s hard work in the field picking grapes and then sitting back satisfied in your contribution to what will surely turn out to be a great bottle of wine.

So I found myself dressed in my ‘farm’ clothes stood outside an unmarked door one dusty morning in Lujan de Cuyo, not really knowing what to expect but ready to get my hands dirty. It didn’t quite turn out like that.

Hacienda del Plata is a small, family-run vineyard with 14 hectares of land. But despite its quaint, laid back and romantic appearance the workers here don’t wait around. I arrived to find the pickers working rapidly in the fields, demonstrating masterfully how quickly one can clear a row of vines from all its glorious fruit.

This profession apparently starts in the womb so I was at a severe disadvantage in even attempting to compete with their nimble, quick working hands. To be honest, I couldn’t even lift a bucket half full of grapes and even meandering into the mud made me feel in the way and like a complete fraud. Bending over all afternoon to lop off grape bundles is no easy work, and a journalist plucking off a few grapes could never claim to have experienced working with the land. I would also be no good at it.

Pablo Gonzalez, the owner of Hacienda del Plata, recognised this. “This work is not for everyone – it is not easy,” he explained to me, politely pointing out the obvious. “These grape pickers have been picking for years and are skilled at what they do. They are no different to you or I, but this is what they do – it is their profession and they work hard at it.”

Pablo was right, I had perhaps taken it for granted that anyone could pick grapes all day, but this is really not the case. Perhaps you can enjoy an afternoon of an organised tourist activity in one of the vineyards here, gathering grapes at a relaxed pace for a few hours and then putting your feet up to enjoy a glass of wine and top notch lunch. But a few hours of work and boozing is not the harvest. The harvest is sweaty, tiring and utterly unglamorous.

Grape pickers spend a period of three months waiting for the few days or weeks in which the vineyard decides they want to pick the different grape varieties and then it is all hands to the dirt. A race ensues as the pickers get through the vines in the fastest, most efficient manner possible while being careful not to damage or miss any of the liquid gold. The truck is filled with tons of buckets and then the fruit gets shipped to the winery and the pickers off home. The reality is that it is a hard but honest day’s work. And you have to admire it.

These solid values of the grape pickers and land workers are the foundations of Hacienda del Plata. With vines over 80 years old, Hacienda del Plata has been producing grapes for almost a century and Pablo took over the vineyard from his father Carlos Enrique González to become the fourth generation owner. He believes the identity of the business today was borne out of the values of its land workers, something which his father taught him to respect.

“Hacienda del Plata focuses on the values of the people working on the land,” he said. “My father wrote about these ideals and qualities of the people - hard work, honesty and humility - and they are reflected in our wines.”
Pablo clearly takes inspiration from his father and holds dear his teachings to respect the pickers and ranchers for their contribution and value that they give to the land. He acknowledges that it is also their sweat and toil which makes a good wine.

“Working on the land is a great educator to respect people,” he says. “These grape pickers and workers do not have any expensive education etc but you learn to respect them as soon as you learn how hard it is to work on the land - this is what my father taught us.”

To add to his family’s legacy, Pablo started to make wine ten years ago in a bid to leave his own legacy – taking Hacienda del Plata in a new direction. Although the vineyard has a long history in vines, it is comparatively new to wines.

“The decision was more of a romantic vision than a business one,” he told me. “When I die I didn’t want to just leave grapes, I wanted to leave more. So I thought, why
not try making wine?”

Recruiting the help of experienced enologists, Pablo has spent the past decade learning how to make wine. “I like this activity, it is honest and noble,” he said. “I have discovered processes that I love in wine making: I love to see the wine transform, to see and smell the changes and taste the development.”
His eldest son, Juan Pablo, who moved back to the family home a couple years ago to join his father in his new wine venture, shares his father’s child-like, wide-eyed passion for experimentation.

“I consider myself lucky to have grown up here on a vineyard and it was always a childhood dream of mine to work in wine,” he said. “I really like to make wine, and now I am involved in every aspect of the wine – you see the process and you are in the process,” he explained.

Wine was however not what Juan started doing. He left home, like all of Pablo’s four children, to study something else and pursue his own career choice. For Juan this was Industrial Engineering.

However when Pablo started making wine, the temptation to join his father in the vineyard was too much for Juan. And now they both spend the rest of year in the bodega, trying and testing new methods in order to come up with something that they think is special. It doesn’t always work out, but when it does Juan says it is worth it: “The wine is like your baby and when it comes out well, it is a very proud and exciting moment.”

Pablo is also a proud and excited father. All four of Pablo’s children have come back home to work together in this new project, despite no such request from him. In fact Pablo, like his father, has always encouraged his children to follow their own desires and interests. When they all decided independently to work with him at Hacienda del Plata he was surprised.

“At first I was worried to work with family,” he admits, “but now I am very happy that I had the opportunity to do this and I can see how happy they all are here.”
As with most family businesses, the Gonzalez family has had its share of historical family feuds but this generation is adamant that they will work hard to stay together on everything.

“We are supporting each other and are all focused on the same direction,” says Juan. “We want to keep it as a family business and make it grow.”

Pablo’s eldest daughter Rosario has also returned to work in the family business and is living on their other small vineyard, Castro Barros, with her husband. They are expecting their first child this winter. For her, this is a chance to return to the idyllic lifestyle that living on a vineyard gave her as a child and to give her future family the same enjoyment.

“I had a lot of fun living here,” she reflects. “I love the life that wine gives you – it always creates great moments. Those moments of sharing the wine and enjoying each other’s company – that is what I love.”

It is clear that Hacienda del Plata is driven by the family’s passion and desire to enjoy the lifestyle of living and working on a vineyard. At the moment they produce around 60,000 bottles a year and the plan is to remain a boutique production and keep the core values and traditions at the heart of Hacienda del Plata.

“The vision for the future is to have a bodega that aims at high quality (but not high volume) wines and never forgets the beautiful part of this, which is the nature and the people,” added Pablo. “We don’t want to lose this, and for me this is the pure pleasure – to stand under my vines of 100 years knowing who and what has gone into them.”

As much as Pablo and his children enjoy the process in the barrels and drinking the final product, he admits that the real ‘wine making’ starts in the ground – exactly where Hacienda del Plata came from. “Seventy percent of a good wine is made in the vines,” he says.

Grape pickers and land workers don’t get any great esteem or Wine Advocate points for all their hard work on the vines but Pablo is keen to stress the value of the sweat and toil of those that work at grassroots level. This is their lifestyle and passion too. Many workers start at a young age in the field and stay there right into their later years. Their faces become sun drenched and weathered like the vines – a real portrait and testimony to their hard work.

“The most important thing is the years of work that have gone into the vines,” concludes Pablo. “The values and work of the people are alive in the wines.”
You know exactly what he means when you look out over the slumber, old vineyard and see dozens of pickers hard at work.


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