GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Winery Henri Cruchon in Echichens, just above the Morges Hospital, makes the kind of excellent quality and comfortable wines that let you forget life’s stresses.
It’s easy for those of us who drink them to forget that when the time arrives to harvest the grapes the pressure suddenly rises sharply for everyone here, from pickers to cellar workers.
Raul Cruchon checks the lunar calendar for his organic winesHarvest time can be make or break season, and on a sunny Thursday, with rain expected Friday, everyone is rushing to bring in the Gamay grapes, fully ripe, as well as Servagnin, a tricky grape with a very special history, grown by only a handful of producers in Vaud. It’s a very old clone of Pinot Noir, cultivated widely in the region from 1420 to the 19th century, that nearly died out. It is being gently revived in a few vineyards.
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Nearly 60 percent of the grapes here are grown organically for the winery’s renowned collection of organic wines.
Watching the moon, targeting the “urgent” grapes
Raul Cruchon, who heads this family winery of 40 hectares, medium-large by Swiss standards, explains that lunar movements are a big part of their calculation for the harvest: Saturday, expected to be sunny, and Sunday, with weather worsening, are two “fruit” days, the best time to harvest fruit.
He’s busy at the cellar out in the countryside near Monnaz, working with the grape press and the trucks and tractors that keep bringing in crates of grapes. A young woman is pouring an enzyme treatment over the freshly arrived grape bunches while two men work the press.
Five km away Raul’s daughter Catherine is busy checking on the grape-picking, reviewing it with the man who decides which rows to pick, in what order – the Gamay rows need two pickings, one to remove the grapes that aren’t good enough for the wine, then the wine grapes. Catherine shows me what looks to me like rotting grapes, and insists I try them. They’re delicious, and they’ll make great wine, but you’d never know it to look at them. The pickers clearly need to know what they are doing.
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Time to say hello to old friends, then get picking
The same people return from year to year, so it’s almost like a large family reunion. Many of them are Portuguese and now their children are coming to pick, a story I see repeated throughout Swiss vineyards.
Raul says the push is first on the urgent grapes, with some suddenly ripening quickly, others affected more by the weather than others. This is not an easy year for wine grape growers in Switzerland, and, he says, it’s not a great year for Gamay. Quite a few of these grapes will be made into rosé where the grapes macerate only briefly and there is less danger of contamination from grapes that are starting to go off.
Maceration is the process that gives red wine its colour, where the juice soaks with the solid materials from the grapes.
Most grape pulp has virtually no colour.
The rows of vines, in a peaceful spot behind the Chateau de Vufflens, come to life as crates of raisins are quickly filled and pickers snip the bunches, moving briskly down the rows.
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New technology gets applause
I join the team as they move to a vineyard, closer to Echichens, with Servagnin grapes, where they start to lift off the protective nets that have kept these grapes safe from birds. The process is slow and there is a lot of netting – but then they pause to see a new system being tried for the first time, a tractor that gently tugs off the nets in a fraction of the time. They’re all delighted and several of the men hold a quick conversation about how the machine works, before heading back to the vines, ever-conscious of time and the weather and the need to bring in today’s grapes.
By 17:00 the pickers have been steadily moving up and down rows all day, but I don’t hear any complaints and despite the fatigue they must be feeling, they look at their crates with pride.
2013, an excellent year for Vaud’s Chasselas
Some of the nets remain on the vines, the grapes that won’t be picked until later. Next week it will be time for the Chasselas grapes, with the most urgent problems under control.
The good news, says Raul with a broad smile, is this appears to be an excellent year for Chasselas, based on the grapes he’s tested.