How to Pick Grapes in 8 Easy Steps

Reustle Prayer Rock Vineyard

1.      First you have to get invited, hired, or recruited.  We did this by buying copious amounts of wine at Reustle Winery.  They also recruited their neighbors, church members and other wine club members.  If you are hired as a seasonal worker, you probably wouldn’t be writing about it.

2.   Next you wait for the call.  The winemaker decides when the grapes are ready so you have to be “on call” for several days.  We called the winery several times to let them know we were in the area and when we got to Roseburg.  Luckily this trip we weren’t so scripted that we could stage ourselves near the winery and planned 2 day trips which could be shuffled depending on when we “got the call”.

3.   Get up on time.  Once we got the call, we realized that suddenly we had to get up at a definite time and be ready to go early.  While we tend to get up fairly early anyway, we enjoy coffee, the paper, and don’t exactly have to meet a deadline. We were careful the night before with preparations to make sure we got up on time.  David even pre-fixed the coffee!  Grapes need to be picked before the hard heat of the day and afternoon.  The grapes need to be crushed within a few hours of picking so it is necessary to be in the vineyard early.

4.     Get your instructions and your equipment.  We arrived at the vineyard by 8 am and were surprised at how many other volunteer workers had been recruited on a Friday.  Most were retirees, though we had a few college students.  There were about 25 of us in all.  All the grapes that we would pick today would earn the same fee per pound as the seasonal workers, but the money would be donated to charity.  It was obvious that the Reustle’s church had organized teams to help support the charity, a fund to provide respite for the families of children with special needs.   We were issued gloves and snippers. The instructions were pretty simple.  When your bucket gets full, yell “BUCKET”, and hopefully someone will bring you a new one.  Pass your bucket toward the tractor.  When lifting the bird nets which are secured with bread ties, yell, “Net up” so that folks can look away and not get a bread tie flung in their face.  Pickers would work in pairs with each team working on opposite sides of the vines and we would space out with 5 vines between teams.  Once you reached the point where the team ahead of you had picked you would do the "five plant hop" ahead of them.

5.     Get to work.  We found that it was one instance where short people had a slight advantage, for the grapes were at a great height for Deb to pick without stooping.  The work wasn’t particularly hard, but dirty and as the morning wore on, hot.  When we finished several rows, we took a water/coffee/cinnamon bun break.  We then picked some more, finishing right after noon. The only problem we had was a logistical one:  often the "grape crates" were being taken to the winery for crush and there was no place to empty the buckets so we would run out of empty buckets.  We picked Gruner Veltliner grapes which were green and often hid behind the leaves (Oh yes, one more instruction,  “no leaves in the bucket”.)  The grapes would be used to make a light white wine.

6.    Eat lunch.   After a hot morning picking, we were treated to lunch with some of the wine that our varietal would soon be made into. We all guessed how many pounds we had picked.  The person closest, got a bottle of wine.  Corporately the 23 of us picked 12,170 pounds of grapes in less than 4 hours.  While we were taking a much needed break, the workers at the winery continued the work, immediately crushing the grapes and getting them ready to ferment.

7.   Taste more wine.  Finally we enjoyed a tasting of other Reustle wines and met Chuck and Gayla, another couple staying in our RV Park.  We would later have supper with them.  Gloria Reustle agreed to ship the wine we had purchased so far at Russian River and in the Umqua Valley back to North Carolina; of course we filled out the cases with Reustle wine. 

Cave at Reustle
Tasting is done in the "catacombs"

8.       And the very last step:  much needed showers and a nap!!!