The fruit has start to slowly but surely come in. The first of the Pinot has come in from a vineyard that is off site. It is picked early in the morning with buckets and transported in macro bins. The pickers are paid per bucket so they are constantly running and picking as fast as they can. They do a great job and the picking is done within a couple hours.

Next the bins are sorted on the line. They are picked into 1/4 ton macro bins which is smaller than usual. They use small bins because they do not want the grapes to be crushed and to lose juice. The bins are loaded onto a hydraulic dumper and raked out gently. The leaves, mold (we had lots of botrytis sadly), and raisins were sorted out. The grapes would then go through the destemmer so that berries alone would end up in the tank. Sometimes the destemmer would be taken apart but rarely.