The sun — the marvelous, glorious sun, the fabulous, beautiful sun — climbed over the hardwoods on the far side of the vineyard. It illuminated rows of grapes shiny with nighttime dew. The clusters, round and glowing, gleamed like pearls.
Snip! Snip-snip! Daurellen Ruiz sliced off one cluster after another. They fell into a yellow box on the ground at her feet. In five minutes, it was full: 30 pounds of Vitis vinifera that will be turned into next year's wine.
"The grapes look good," said Ruiz, who should know. She's picked eight years for Habersham Winery, one of Georgia's oldest and largest vintners.
She paused and looked at the sky, where only a few white wisps curled across a blue dome. “The rain,” she said, “it slowed us down.”
The wettest summer anyone can remember is nearing an end. The deluges of June, July and August — rainfall 34 percent heavier than the year before — have made way for clear skies and sunny days. If the dry weather holds, Georgia wine makers may yet toast this season.
All around Ruiz, a dozen other laborers reached into vines heavy with 2013’s bounty.
They have to move fast. Picking should have begun in mid-August; instead, workers are just now plucking produce that will render Merlot, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Sangiovese. Vineyards from the flatlands to the hills are bustling.
Just in time, too, said David Lockwood, a plant science professor for the University of Tennessee who specializes in grapes. The rains, he said, not only made vineyards too muddy for machinery, they also diluted the grapes' sugar content. A sweeter grape creates better white, blush and red wines.
“It’s not going to be a vintage year,” predicted Lockwood, who advises wineries in Tennessee and north Georgia. “We’ll make some good wines, but it won’t be a great year.”
More than 40 vineyards operate across the state, producing an estimated $8.3 million in grapes a year. Some are based south and east of Atlanta, and specialize in scuppernongs, a variety of muscadine native to this region. Most vintners are based north and west of Atlanta, and focus on grapes that thrive on cool slopes.
Add in the value of the wines and the spending of tourists who visit vineyards to sample them, and the annual economic impact mounts to $585 million, according to a 2005 study by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government.
Racing the calendar
With the exception of a six-month experiment in selling insurance — she didn’t like it — Terri Haney has worked continually for Habersham Winery since 1983. She’s the vineyard manager, responsible for the care and harvest of more than 30 acres of grapes on two tracts.
She drives a Jeep. It gets a lot of use, on- and off-road.
On a recent morning, Haney jammed the machine into gear and headed into winery’s largest vineyard. The Jeep pulled a trailer with two crib-sized plastic bins. Each was capable of holding about 900 pounds of grapes.
She drove to a rise, stepped out and took it all in: the pickers, leaning into the tangles of leaves; the vines, still spangled with dew; and the land, as rumpled as a poorly made bed. A raptor’s shrill cry sounded in the distance. She lit a cigarette.
“I’ve always liked to be outdoors,” she said.
While pickers picked, she maneuvered her Jeep between the rows, dumping grapes from the workers’ boxes into the deep bins. She kept a tally of the boxes each worker filled. Depending on what grapes they’re harvesting, workers get between $1.65 and $2 per box. A deft picker can fill a box in three to five minutes; again, it depends on the variety of grape.
On this day, they were picking Seyval grapes. Each is about the size of a marble. Seyvals explode in your mouth, a sweet blast followed by a tangy aftertaste. They’re blended in an array of wines.
Habersham produces 22 varieties of wine, and sells between 12,000 and 15,000 cases annually.
The summer, said Haney, was a trial. Work days would begin, only to end suddenly when thunderclouds boiled up over the mountains and dumped water everywhere. The showers soaked grapes, which develop best with sunlight and air. She had to spray to keep fungus from developing, too.
And, all along, she watched the calendar. “We should be halfway through by now,” Haney said, “and we’ve just started.”
Three hours after they began, the pickers had loaded seven bins. A skinny man in a straw cowboy hat loaded them onto a battered Ford flatbed dump truck, then drove it to the winery, located one county over in Helen.
Steve Gibson, the winery’s general manager, watched as scales weighed each bin. The morning’s haul: 6,094 pounds. In short order, three tons of grapes would tumble into a culvert-shaped grape press.
A county away, Daurellen Ruiz and others bent to the vines, the sun — the glorious, fabulous sun — hot on their backs.
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