Wine myths
Hand-harvested wine is better
“If it says hand-harvested, it is a better wine.”
Hand picking allows selection and keeps bunches whole, which matters for some wines. Machine picking is faster and can happen at night in the cold, which matters for others. Neither is better as such.
The full answer
Hand harvesting genuinely enables things machines cannot do: selecting between bunches at the vine, picking the same parcel repeatedly over weeks for botrytised fruit, and delivering whole intact bunches for whole-bunch pressing or carbonic maceration.
Machine harvesting has real advantages of its own. It can pick a large area in hours, which matters enormously when rain is forecast, and it can pick at three in the morning when the fruit is cold — a genuine quality advantage in hot regions, where warm fruit oxidises on the way to the winery.
Modern optical sorting has also moved the argument. A machine-picked load passed over an optical sorter can arrive cleaner than a hand-picked one that was not sorted.
Some of the world’s steepest vineyards have no choice: the Mosel and the Douro are hand-picked because a machine cannot physically operate there, not because hand picking was selected on merit.
Hand harvesting is expensive, so it does correlate with wines somebody has invested in — which is a signal about the producer’s intentions, not about the picking method.
A reading of the available evidence by people qualified to make it, where the evidence genuinely underdetermines the answer.
What would settle it: Evidence arriving that settles the question either way.
Sources
Sources consulted
- UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology — University of California, Davis
- WSET educational materials and the Systematic Approach to Tasting — Wine & Spirit Education Trust
- Wine Australia — regions, GIs and market information — Wine Australia