Harvest: The Fastest Days in a Life Lived Slowly
At Ca’ del Grevino, we wait all year for this.
For most of the year, the vineyard is a quiet companion.
It grows slowly. It breathes with the seasons. It asks for patience.
But in October, everything changes.
Harvest comes not with fanfare—but with tension. With instinct. With a thousand tiny decisions that start before dawn and last until the last bin is full. It is the most urgent, most vulnerable, most sacred moment in the life of a wine.
And it’s the only time of year when everything at Grevino moves fast.
🌅 Mornings Before the Sun
The day begins in silence—real silence. Before the hum of machines, before even the birds. The air is cold. The fruit is still sleeping. And the vineyard crew is already moving.
Harvest starts early because grapes speak clearest when it’s cool. Their acidity, sugar, and structure are honest in the morning. We pick by hand, row by row, cluster by cluster. The hands that harvest are experienced—many have worked the same rows for years. They know what to keep and what to leave. They know that perfection isn’t uniform.
As bins fill with fruit, the sun rises, and the urgency quickens. Because the moment is fleeting. And if you miss it, you don’t get it back until next year.
🍇 Sorting What Matters
Back at the winery, the rush continues—but not without grace.
Each cluster is sorted by hand. Leaves removed. Sunburned skins discarded. It’s a physical act of respect. Because what you choose to leave out of a wine is as important as what you leave in.
From there, the grapes are pressed or crushed, depending on the varietal. Reds are often left intact, whole-berry. Whites may be gently pressed. Fermentation begins—naturally, slowly—using the wild yeasts on the fruit, not powdered packages from a lab. Because we don’t manufacture character. We coax it out.
🕰️ Why Harvest Means More at Grevino
At many wineries, harvest is a race to the bottle. The goal is to pick, press, ferment, bottle, and sell—often within the same year. But not here.
At Grevino, harvest is just
the prologue.
After fermentation, the wine will spend years in oak, and more years in bottle, before it ever meets your table. Which is why the choices we make in these few days—what day to pick, how long to macerate, what to blend, what to age—matter so much.
Harvest is not just the beginning of the wine.
It is the
beginning of its destiny.
🍷 From Chaos to Stillness
There’s a beautiful contradiction in winemaking: the wines you savor slowly, the wines that feel soft, restrained, and timeless—they often come from the most intense moments of all.
Harvest is chaos.
Harvest is urgency.
Harvest is pressure.
And then it’s over. The bins are empty. The vines begin to sleep. And the wines begin to dream of what they’ll become.
At Ca’ del Grevino, we harvest by hand, age with patience, and release only when the wine is ready—not when the market is.
Because we believe the most meaningful things take time.
And this—this beautiful, busy, breathless season—is how it all begins.
