26 September 2012

The traditional grape harvest

At the last weekend, we visited our friend Isidro in his vineyards. He vintaged manually with a team of eight people... they had a fantastic atmosphere and extraordinary grapes... he is going to have a really good crop this year. Isidro has half of his vineyards like vineyard trellis which will be vintaged mechanically in a week's time. 

The workflow of manual vintage is using a small basket for two workers who go in the same  row of stocks. When they arrive to the end of the row, they unload grapes in a big basket which is installed in his tractor and after that, they begin another new row. This big basket is driven hydraulically and it allows us to unload it over any trailer easily and it avoids big efforts for workers when they need to unload their small baskets.

After this visit, we went to the grape cooperative store "Cooperativa del Campo Ntra. Sra. de la Asunción" in our Village because we wanted to see how they unloaded trailers. It has two stainless steel shaft  which one is dedicated for red grapes and other is dedicated for white grapes. 

The winery is beautiful and it highlights to have a large hygiene but in last years it doesn't have a big workload... we think it works about 30% of its capacity because a lot of farmers took out their vineyards a few years ago when they had important subventions for that.