Low Hanging Fruit

Low hanging fruit is not your friend when harvesting grapes. Short people have a definite advantage when harvesting in the vineyards. 

photo by Trasie Phan

Tim and I were recruited by Doug and Thao, American friends, to help a Portuguese family harvest grapes on a recent Saturday morning. The couple has helped this family to harvest grapes for three years running. Doug gave us brief orientation: all grapes go in the bucket unless moldy or drier than a raisin. And pick out the leaves. We got this! Vamos lá.

Tim finding most grape bunches are at knee height.

The morning chill quickly turned to humid heat under the strong Portuguese sun. We bent over to reach the purple beauties hidden behind large leaves that were turning to reds and browns in the fall temperatures. Bend, hunt, snip, toss, repeat until your bucket is full. Then fill another. And another. Most bunches weigh a pound or more, quickly filling our buckets.

Manuel Lucas and his sons will deliver many thousands of kilos of grapes to the community co-op, where they pay by weight.  The grapes will be crushed, fermented, and bottled as some of the most delicious wine blends of Portugal.  

Manuel´s sons collect the full buckets we left in the rows. They hoist the heavy buckets and dump the grapes into enormous bins.  Our smaller buckets weigh 45 pounds (20 kilos) and larger buckets weigh 56 pounds (25.5 kilos). I wonder how many hundreds of buckets they hoisted this one day alone?

After working our first row, I noticed family members following behind us. They collected every grape we missed. They even picked individual grapes that had landed on the ground. When family income depends on weight, every grape counts.

Harvesting grapes provided us a firsthand experience of the hard labor involved in subsisting from the land. It offered us a deeper understanding of Portuguese life and the tradition of working together for the fruits of the earth. 

Love from Tim and Penelope

Still imaging all the People...