The Date Brothers Harvest

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Fruit in the pre flowering stage around October

Harvest is usually around late February, early March, when the Baume (sugar) levels have reached around 13.5 to 14.0

This is when the winemaker expects the fruit to be at its best eg: colour and flavours.
We use a contract harvester from Robinvale (O'Connor harvesting) they use a self propelled New holland harvester.
It takes about three minutes to strip one row of vines that would normally take hand pickers three days!
This method of harvesting causes no damage to the fruit, but saves so much time. To the right is a bunch after stripping which shows the vine undamaged as well.
Harvesting at night allows the fruit to be picked in the cool so that the fruit arrives at the winery in a fresh, cool condition.
The grapes are transported from the harvester into one-ton bins.
The bins are then loaded onto a truck and transported to Dominion wines, our winemakers situated at Avenal, Victoria.