Vintage days in "La Manchuela" region

This year we have repeatedly spoken about different works in vineyards... this crop requires a lot of tasks so winegrowers need a large variety of machinery to work in vineyards. In the end, the vintage is about to finish and it is the time to pick up the efforts performed during the year.

In this occasion, you can see pictures about "Los Transis" family (from Quintanar del Rey - Cuenca). They are vintaging with their new Pellenc Optimum 750 L grapes harvester. This family has a vineyard of 300he. They use two grape harvesters to carry out the vintage. Pictures are sent by our friend Jesús Ángel which are from the grape delivery day. Jesús Ángel is sales manager in Buraglia Martínez dealer (in Motilla del Palancar Village - Cuenca).

Quintanar del Rey Village is located in "La Manchuela" region. This area is between La Mancha and Cuenca's mountains range so it covers villages of Cuenca, Albacete and Valencia provinces. Definitely, it is an area where there are a lot of vineyards and where year by year wine is better under the Manchuela Denominación de Origen (Designation of Origin). We have to highlight the "San Isidro" Farming Cooperative of Quintanar del Rey was founded in 1950 and nowadays it has over 850 partners. The varieties of grapes used to produce white wines, rosé wines and red are: Bobal, Tempranillo, Syrah, Cabernet, Merlot, Macabeo and Garnacha.

As Jesús Ángel told us, the new Pellenc Optimum 750 L grape harvested (Perkins Tier IV engine) has new long flexible picking arms and a new shaking system. It has the longest lower sealing on the market (2.5m to 2.86m) so grapevines are really dry (witout grape-juice) after the vintage even when the Optimum works in vineyards of large yields and at high working speed.

Versión en español.

Grape harvest

I would like to show you a few pictures and a video so you can see something about grape harvest tasks. In my area there are few vineyards, therefore these tasks are almost missing. I can remember when I was a child and my parents harvested grapes manually... nowadays people continue harvesting grapes manually if the vineyard is not prepared for harvesting grapes with the automatic system. Harvesting grapes is very common in September, especially in my area (in other Spanish areas and with other varieties of grape the harvesting can be doing in August). As I told you in previous posts, we don't have vineyards and I am not a expert about that.

We were with our cousin Enrique Lopez who was harvesting grapes in the farm where he works because we wanted to see how grape harvest machinery worked. We have never seen working this machinery before. I think The Pellenc 3050 gets grapes very clean and any grapes are lost. I have to tell pulled grape harvesters work slower than propelled harvesting machines and as you can see in our video, the working speed is not very high. Thank to no mechanical  transmission, the machinery can turn 90º to the left and right. So they can work in every heads without problems.

You can watch a video from our YouTube channel.

You can see our pictures from Picasa.

Joaquín y Herminio Tribaldos (Twins' Farm)