Blog contributed by Tate Gregory, Treasurer of Texas Wine Growers, and Director of Vineyards for William Chris Wine Company
Editor’s Note: August marks one of the busiest seasons in the Texas grape harvest. While many wine lovers enjoy the finished bottle, few ever see what happens in the vineyard during harvest. Tate shares a firsthand look at the long nights, difficult decisions, and teamwork required to bring 100% Texas-grown grapes from vineyard to winery. This year, many vineyards in the Hill Country and High Plains are harvesting simultaneously has come early in both the Hill Country and High Plains, where many are harvesting in both regions simultaneously!
People ask me what harvest is like, expecting a tidy answer. The truth is there isn’t one day that looks like another. Nights become days, time is irrelevant, and sleep comes in small spurts when you can spare it.
Between Hye Estate and Uplift, we’re managing 61 acres: 55 at Uplift and 6 at Hye Estate. That includes 14 varietals, along with many other vineyards that we purchase fruit from. From the first Viognier pick in early July through the last reds in mid-August, the Hill Country harvest days blur into a single long push. across the heart of the Texas wine harvest.
Most picks happen at night or in the pre-dawn hours, so the fruit comes in cool and our crew isn’t working in 100-degree heat. Prep has occurred during the day before: trailers and bins where they need to go, harvester greased and clean, and new batteries in all the headlamps. By the time the sun is up, the first truckload is usually unloaded at the winery, and I am hopefully grabbing a couple of hours of sleep so that I can be ready for what’s next.
Harvest is really two jobs running at once: getting ripe fruit off the vine and keeping everything else alive and clean long enough to get there. If we catch a rain during the harvest season, every fungicide decision has to thread the needle between disease control and pre-harvest intervals, since the wrong product too close to picking can push a block’s harvest date back by days or weeks, where it will be too late. It’s a different kind of pressure than the physical grind: it’s the quiet stress of knowing a mistake here doesn’t show up for months, and by then it’s too late to fix.
Then there’s the equipment, which has its own opinions about timing. Anyone who’s run a harvester at 1 AM knows that “breakdown” isn’t really a possibility you plan around; it’s a certainty you plan for. You keep spare parts you hope you never need and a mental list of who to call when you do.
By early afternoon the next day, I’m usually back at the vineyard or on the phone, coordinating with the winery on logistics, deciding which block gets picked next based on brix, weather, and how much room we have to receive it. Vineyard management during harvest is as much a logistics job as a farming one; the vines did their work during the season, and now it’s about not wasting any of it.
The days that stick with you aren’t the smooth ones. It’s the night the harvester broke down at 4 AM and you fixed it by headlamp, or the afternoon you walked a block and called off a pick because it just wasn’t at that perfect ripeness level yet. That’s the part people don’t see when they’re drinking the finished wine a year or two later: how many 3 AM decisions, how many phone calls, how many small saves it took to get the fruit into the winery in the shape it needed to be in.
By the time we make our last Hill Country pick with late-ripening reds in mid-August, we are usually ready to start picking early-ripening reds in the High Plains. It’s a calming feeling when you have delivered the last of your estate fruit, but the job is not finished yet. It’s time to do it all over again in West Texas, where another chapter of the Texas grape harvest is just beginning.
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