#105 Harvest Team, "Go!"

The fruit is ready and the weather is not going to get any better.

Boundary Breaks Vineyard team member, John Swick, joined us in 2011 and stands atop a trailer of harvest bins, waiting for the next load of grapes from the team machine-harvesting Riesling. John is a designer and builder, and when anything related to our vineyard operation needs to be designed and built, we turn to John. Thank you, John.

After a week of waiting for our fruit to ripen further, we concluded that it is as ripe as it can be. Temperatures for the next two weeks are going to be in the 40’s and low 50’s, which is not sufficient to offer additional benefit. Plus, the skins of the grapes are softening, which makes them increasingly susceptible to disease. So it is time to get them all off.

In Substack #69 I wrote about the “Dunbar number,” which is, roughly, estimated to be about 150. That is the number of people (theoretically) that can form a group where all the individuals “know each other well enough, so that if one were to meet another in a bar, they could sit down together and enjoy the conversation.” Another word for this might be: the “tribe.”

We reach out to some of the other members of this tribe when it is time to bring our grapes in and then to produce our wine. (More on this next week in Substack #106.)

Mark Wentzel is the Vineyard Manager at Buttonwood Grove and Six-Eighty Cellars on the west side of Cayuga Lake. We hire Mark and the owner of those two vineyards, Dave Pittard (see below), to come and harvest our grapes with their state-of-the-art, mechanical harvester. They are both exceptionally-skilled, and we are fortunate to be working with them. Thank you, Mark.

Dave Pittard, owner of Buttonwood Grove and Six-Eighty Cellars wineries, atop the Gregoire G-8 auto-harvester. We are partners with Dave and the owners of Hosmer and Thirsty Owl vineyards in an association that employs H2A Visa vineyard workers. We employ a team of 18 individuals who arrive in March to perform much of the manual labor required in the vineyard during the spring and summer. Thank you, Dave.

Miguel Angel Vasquez Sebastian, has been working with us as part of the H2A Vineyard team since 2020. We provide air transportation for all the H2A team-members to fly up from Mexico; we provide housing at the Spring Meadows Apartments nearby in Romulus; and we provide 12-passenger vans for them to travel between the many vineyard locates that our association manages. Thank you, Miguel Angel.

We use mechanized auto-harvesters to pick the majority of our fruit. The vines in very young vineyard blocks, like the ones we planted in 2022, are not sturdy enough to withstand the way the auto-harvester shakes them to remove the fruit. So, we pick a small amount of fruit by hand.

Like Miguel Angel, José Luis Gusman Ortiz has been with us since 2020 as a member of the H2A vineyard team. As is the case with any employee who has been with the organization for four years, both Miguel Angel and José Luis know our vineyards and know our vineyard practices. They are skilled and hard-working in the areas that allow us to make exceptional wines. Without them, as is the case with all of our long-term employees, we would not be where we are today. Thank you, José Luis,

Jesse Kovnat joined our vineyard team in 2017 after a career in wine sales in New York City. He oversees our H2A program from start to finish, maintaining our relationship with the US Dept. of State, as well as with multiple outside agencies and people who participate in our guest worker program. Thank you, Jesse.

When our Vineyard Team loads 20, one-ton bins of grapes onto Barry Tortolon’s large trailer, their work for the 2024 vintage is officially done. Barry, who has done just about everything anyone can do in the Finger Lakes wine industry, is currently delivering grapes for Doyle Vineyard Management services. He is definitely part of the Finger Lakes wine tribe. It is a real pleasure handing our grapes over to Barry, because that means it’s the winemakers’ turn to obsess over the juice. Thank you, Barry.

Vineyard Manager Kees Stapel has assumed complete, end-to-end responsibility for seeing that our vineyard production reaches the presses of the several teams of winemakers that we work with each year. He was the first, full-time employee at Boundary Breaks, starting with us in 2010. His relationship with the other members of the Finger Lakes wine tribe makes him able to solve just about any problem that arises. It gives me great satisfaction to delegate all of this to Kees. He handles it all. I have one remaining responsibility: that is simply to make sure he has all the tools and resources to be successful. Thank you, Kees.

Next week, more of the tribe: the Winemakers.