Burt and I spent about 6 hours, joined by Patrick for about 3 hours, in the blazing sun on an incredibly steep slope picking overripe Merlot at a home vineyard in Saratoga. Most of the clusters were rejected out of hand. The fairly good ones we had to pluck off raisinated and bird pecked grapes before putting them in the bucket. It was often difficult to find flat spots within reach to put the buckets. When the buckets were full we had to carry them way way down to the road at the bottom of the steep hill. Very exhausting. The state of the grapes alone meant it took several times as long to harvest, for what we got.
The crush was straight-forward. Burt's manually operated crusher/destemmer works quickly. Our estimate is this will result in an optimistic 6 cases.
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