Inside a Harvest: A Day in the Vines

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The first decision of a wine harvest is a matter of hours, and often of darkness. In Provence, Maison Mirabeau has picked at night so that grapes reach the cellar cool rather than sun-warmed, and a Decanter explainer on night harvesting describes fruit arriving at around 18°C instead of 35°C or more. That difference governs everything that follows: how fast the fermentation starts, how much aroma survives, how much the winery has to spend on refrigeration.

This year the clock moved earlier still, as Santé reported in its look at Burgundy’s early 2026 harvest. In Champagne, Joseph Perrier began picking Chardonnay on August 12, 2026, and Pinot Noir and Meunier on August 17, calling it one of the earliest harvests in the house’s history. Wherever and whenever it begins, a wine harvest day follows a recognisable shape. Here is what it involves.

Before First Light: How a Wine Harvest Day Begins

In Burgundy, according to the Beaune tourist office, a typical estate runs a team of around twenty pickers for ten to fifteen days. Work starts at about 7:30, with a break two hours later for coffee, bread, charcuterie and a glass of the estate’s wine. Experienced hands work beside first-timers, showing them how to cut cleanly at the stalk, lift the bunch without crushing it and drop anything rotten or raisined on the ground.

Pickers fill buckets or small baskets; porters move down the rows collecting them. The vessel matters. In Champagne the old wicker mannequins held 70 to 80 kilos, and the Union des Maisons de Champagne notes they are being replaced by perforated crates that let air in and juice out, so the berries at the bottom are not crushed by the weight above. A single picker there averages 300 to 400 kilos a day.

By Hand or by Machine

Machines straddle the row and shake the vine until the berries fall. They are fast and in Burgundy cost two to three times less than hand picking, according to the Burgundy Report, which is why they are common for Chardonnay destined for the simpler appellations.

What a machine cannot do is deliver an intact bunch. That rules it out wherever the winemaker wants whole clusters, and it rules it out entirely in Champagne, where hand harvesting is a condition of the appellation. Black grapes destined for white wine must arrive with their skins unbroken, so that no colour bleeds into the juice. The Comité Champagne puts the seasonal workforce at around 120,000 people.

The Sorting Table

At the cellar door, most quality estates now tip the harvest onto a table de tri: a slow conveyor, often vibrating, where a line of people pull out leaves, snails, unripe second-crop bunches and anything touched by rot. The vibration also shakes off water when fruit has been picked in the rain. Some cellars sort twice, before and after destemming.

In Champagne there is no destemming and no crushing. Whole bunches go straight into the press, and the rules on extraction are strict: from every 4,000 kilos of grapes, no more than 2,550 litres of juice, divided into 2,050 litres of cuvée and 500 of taille. Varieties and villages are pressed separately, so the press house runs late into the night.

Stems or No Stems

For red wine the great stylistic choice comes next. A destemmer strips the berries from the stalks; many then pass through rollers that split the skins. Leave the stems on, and you are making a whole-bunch (or whole-cluster) wine.

Stems bring tannin and a perceptible freshness, and can bring herbal, spicy, tea-like notes; they also absorb some colour, so whole-bunch reds are often paler. Inside the intact berries, a portion of fermentation begins without yeast, which softens and perfumes the fruit. Burgundy has no single answer. Domaine Dujac under Jacques Seysses was famous for fermenting with all its stems; his sons now destem a proportion depending on the wine and the year. Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and, in Cornas, Domaine Clape are widely cited as full whole-cluster producers.

Cold Soak and the Cap

Once in tank, many Burgundian reds rest before fermentation begins. This cold maceration, at 12 to 18°C for two to four days, extracts colour and aroma in a watery solution, before alcohol starts pulling out harder tannins.

When fermentation starts, carbon dioxide pushes the skins to the surface, forming a dense cap. It must be broken and kept wet, or it dries out and turns volatile. There are two methods:

• Pigeage (punch-down): the cap is pushed back into the juice. At small Burgundy estates this is still done by people climbing into open vats; elsewhere by pneumatic plungers.
• Remontage (pump-over): juice is drawn from the bottom of the tank and sprayed over the cap. It is gentler, and the Burgundy Report notes more domaines now favour it over heavy punching.

Total time on skins, the cuvaison, typically runs two to three weeks before the wine is pressed off.

Lunch, and the Long Afternoon

Lunch comes at around 12:30 and lasts an hour. At family estates it is eaten at long tables in a barn or courtyard: soup, a stew, cheese, bread and the domaine’s own bottles, cooked for a crew that has been bent double since dawn. The afternoon shift ends at about five; the cellar team carries on with pressing, punch-downs and cleaning.

The Paulée and the Cochelet

When the last row is picked, the proprietor feeds everyone. In Burgundy this is the paulée, described by the Bourgogne wine board as the festive meal offered by the owner to the workers. One popular etymology traces the word to the poêle, the pan in which the meal was cooked. The Paulée de Meursault grew from this into a grand bring-your-own-bottle lunch at the Château de Meursault, formalised in the 1920s and held since 1932 on the Monday after the Hospices de Beaune auction. Chablis has its Peulée; Bordeaux, the gerbebaude.

In Champagne the meal is the cochelet, or le chien in the Aube, according to the Comité Champagne. Visitors whose stay coincides with the end of picking can sometimes join in.

How to Experience the Wine Harvest

• Go: Champagne promotes a “grape picker for a day” scheme for visitors, and the Champagne et Vous festival brings open estates at the end of October.
• Compare stems: taste a Dujac Morey-Saint-Denis beside a Clape Cornas and look for the lifted, spicy, slightly tea-leaf character that whole clusters can give. Shop it at Wine.com / Shop it at Wine.com
• Read on: how climate change is reshaping the wine harvest calendar, and Santé’s daily Wine A-to-Z series covers Champagne and Burgundy in depth.