Harvesting the grapes

View from the escarpment.  Photo by Andrew Dufresne.

Of course, it’s all different now.

Fifty years ago, the 32,000 acres of grapes spread across Chautauqua County, NY, and Erie County, PA, were all harvested by hand.  Vineyards  stretched across the Lake Erie plain and undulated up the escarpment to the Allegheny Plateau.  By October, the grape leaves turned golden and deep purple clusters hung heavily, emitting the delicious scent of ripe, sweet grapes.  Crews of pickers worked their way down the rows, snipping off the ripe bunches and placing them in wooden crates emblazoned with “Welch’s” or “Bedford Fruit,” signifying their destination.

The crews were made up of entire farm families, some of the neighbors, and a few  townies as well.  We  kids helped out on the weekends and school holidays, earning the princely sum of 50 cents per hour and eating our ration of delectable grapes.   It was a community affair to get the harvest in before a killing frost, flocks of wild turkeys, or roaming herds of deer decimated the crop.  The adults made an astronomical dollar per hour, picking in all kinds of weather.  Sometimes sunny and warm, it was often grey, rainy, or even snowing at this time of year. After a full day spent working outdoors, one felt a deep sense of accomplishment and even deeper relief of getting back to the shelter, warmth, and conviviality of hearth and home.

The pickers slowly made their way down the long rows leaving a dotted stream of crates behind. The loading crew consisted of a tractor driver, a stacker on the trailer, and a loader walking behind.  The tractor and trailer were tall enough to pass over the crates and, while passing down the row, the loader would swing each 25 pound crate up onto the trailer where the stacker lifted it neatly into place.  Even a small ten acre vineyard could produce seventy tons of grapes, so the workout was significant, 140,000 pounds of lifting being nothing to sneeze at.  And even then the work was not done, as the crates were restacked onto trucks taking the harvest to be processed.

Today, mechanized harvesters rumble through the rows, frightening rabbits and depriving  school kids of their weekend jobs.  But by working quickly, day and night, the harvest is much more successful in avoiding the vicissitudes of killing frost and ravenous critters.  The grapes are trucked to plants which press them into juice, most arriving on supermarket shelves but some diverted to local winemakers.  The most common grape from this region is the Concord, not by accident sharing the name with Concord, Massachusetts.

Horticulturist and Boston native Ephraim Wales Bull, evaluating over 22,000 seedlings, worked to develop a sweet, tasty, hardy grape on his farm in Concord.  Finally after years of attempts, he succeeded in 1849.  The toponymous Concord grape quickly spread to New York, Pennsylvania, and beyond.

Then in 1893, Charles Bramwell Welch founded the company bearing his name in Westfield, NY.   Dr. Welch, a teetotalling physician and dentist from New Jersey, was looking for a wine replacement to use in communion services.  His “unfermented wine” pressed from Concord grapes turned out to be very successful, with demand extending well beyond the church.   It made sense to base his juice company in Chautauqua County, the heart of Concord grape country.  Completing the circle, Welch’s has in recent years moved its headquarters to Concord MA, though still sourcing many tons of grapes from the Lake Erie region.

As  October passes and November approaches, with the winds swinging down from Canada promising frosts to come, the machines toil in the vineyards, racing the coming of the snow.  Now, as I enjoy that fresh glass of sweet grape juice and savor a PBJ sandwich, I consider for a moment the arduously tended vineyards which yield these simple pleasures.