Vendemmia: The Most Important Decision of the Year
There is a point towards the end of summer when life at Tenuta Il Finale changes quite suddenly.
Crates begin appearing outside our front door. Tractors seem to occupy every available piece of the driveway. People come and go from early morning. Conversations become shorter and weather forecasts are checked with an almost obsessive regularity. This is vendemmia.
Before living in a vineyard, I thought harvest was essentially the culmination of the year. The grapes were ripe, everyone went into the vineyard, picked them and brought them into the cantina. We now know that the picking is almost the easy bit. The difficult part is deciding when.
And it turns out that this is a question winegrowers have been asking for thousands of years. A word almost as old as winemaking. Even the Italian word vendemmia carries its history with it. It comes from the Latin vindemia, formed from vinum, wine, and demere, meaning to take away or remove. Quite literally, it describes taking the grapes from the vine. An early form of the word, vendimia, was already recorded by around the ninth century.
But grape harvest itself is, of course, considerably older. Across the ancient wine-growing world, harvest was not simply another agricultural job. It marked the moment when an entire year's work was gathered in and when something extraordinarily perishable had to be transformed, very quickly, into something that could last.
For centuries it was also intensely communal. Grapes had to be picked by hand and moved quickly, which required people, and lots of them. Families, neighbours and seasonal workers worked together, and the completion of harvest naturally became associated with food, celebration and thanksgiving. And that sense of occasion has never completely disappeared.
Spend August and September in Piemonte and vendemmia is still something you feel happening around you. Tractors appear on the roads everywhere and the rhythm of villages changes. But behind the romance of this special time of year, lies an enormous amount of judgement.
There isn't really a harvest date
There is no date circled on the calendar marked HARVEST. For our winery team every vintage asks a different question.
Is the fruit actually ready?
How much longer can we leave it?
What is the weather going to do?
Is rain coming?
Are the grapes healthy?
Are the sugars moving too quickly? Are we losing acidity?
Are the skins and seeds physiologically ripe?
Which vineyard should come in first?
And perhaps the most difficult question of all:
What happens if we wait?
A few extra days on the vine can change the fruit. Sometimes those days are exactly what it needs. Sometimes waiting is the wrong decision.
The answer also depends upon the wine you are trying to make. The International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) notes something particularly revealing about historical harvest records. Harvest date isn't determined by climate alone. Wine style, grape health and the intended use of the fruit also influence the decision.
So two growers looking at apparently similar grapes may quite reasonably choose different picking dates. That is what makes vendemmia so fascinating. It isn't simply the point at which nature tells you the grapes are ready. It is a negotiation between nature, experience and intention.
What exactly is a winemaker looking for?
Once, much of the answer came through the senses. Winemakers and farmers looked at the bunches. They would taste the grapes and feel the skins. And even perhaps looked at the seeds. They would know their vineyard and remembered what happened in previous years.
Those things still matter enormously. But today they sit alongside measurements. Grapes can be sampled throughout ripening and analysed for sugar, acidity and pH. Weather stations provide extraordinarily local information. Forecasts are better. Historical records can be compared and vineyard mapping can reveal variations across individual parcels.
The question is no longer simply, Are the grapes ripe? A winemaker is now looking for balance. Sugar rises as grapes ripen. Acidity generally falls. Aromas and flavours develop. Seeds and skins mature. Colour and phenolic compounds change. Meanwhile disease pressure, heat, rain and dehydration may all be moving in different directions.
Those processes do not necessarily arrive at their ideal point on the same Tuesday afternoon. That is the art of the decision.
Cesare and Luigi — and the decision to pick
As harvest approached, our winemakers, Cesare and Luigi, were constantly watching two things: the grapes and the weather.
The heat had become part of the equation. As temperatures remained high, the grapes continued to accumulate sugar, but higher sugar is not automatically better. Leave the fruit too long and sugar can continue to rise while acidity falls, potentially changing the balance of the wine and increasing the eventual alcohol level.
So, the conversations became almost daily. How are the sugars looking? What is happening to the acidity? How are the grapes tasting? How much more heat is coming? Do we leave them a little longer, or is this the moment to bring them in?
And then there was another question: If we pick them now, what happens next?
Picking is only the beginning. In warm weather, freshly harvested grapes can arrive at the cantina already carrying considerable heat from the vineyard. From the moment they are cut, how quickly they are transported, where they are held and how they are stored before processing all matter.
So, Cesare and Luigi weren't simply deciding when our grapes were ready. They were thinking about the entire journey. They were thinking about how we would pick them, how quickly we could move them, how we would protect and store the fruit, and what condition it would be in when it reached the next stage.
The harvest date becomes less a date than a window. It is a point where ripeness, sugar, acidity, temperature, weather, people and logistics all have to line up at once. Sugar can be measured. Acidity can be measured. Weather can be forecast. Grapes can be sampled and analysed.
But eventually all of that information has to become a decision. And despite all the technology now available, the question at the heart of vendemmia remains remarkably simple: Do we pick tomorrow, or do we wait?
And then there is the weather
Every farmer talks about weather, but during vendemmia the relationship becomes particularly intense. A forecast can change the entire week's plan.
If significant rain is approaching, do you harvest slightly earlier while the fruit is healthy? Or leave it because you believe the grapes need another few days? If temperatures remain high, are sugars rising faster than the flavours are developing? If it has been extremely dry, is the vine beginning to suffer? If conditions are humid, is disease becoming a greater risk? And what if the forecast is wrong?
These are not theoretical questions. Once grapes have been picked, there is no putting them back. Perhaps that is why harvest exposes something fundamental about farming. However much science and technology we add, agriculture still involves making decisions about a biological system that we cannot completely control.
And 2026 made those questions particularly relevant here in Piemonte.
This was officially the hottest summer in Piemonte's regional record dating back to 1958. ARPA Piemonte recorded an average summer temperature of 21.6°C - 3.1°C above the 1991-2020 average and 0.5°C above the previous record set in 2003. Summer rainfall was also around 20% below the climatic average. (ARPAPiemonte)
The conditions were particularly persistent. Only eight of the 92 days of summer were cooler than average, and four separate heatwaves affected the region. July alone was around 3°C warmer than normal and rainfall was approximately 52% below average. (ARPAPiemonte)
That is the wider backdrop to the decisions Cesare and Luigi were making in our vineyard. Watching the grapes, their sugars and acidity while also considering the heat, the condition of the fruit and how it would be picked, moved and stored.
No two vendemmie are the same
This is also why vintage matters. The vine does not start again each January with a clean slate and follow a standard programme.
One year may bring a wet spring. Another an early burst of heat. Flowering can be perfect or difficult. Summer may be dry, humid, exceptionally hot or surprisingly mild. Hail can affect one hillside and leave another untouched. Even within the same vineyard, elevation, soil, exposure and the amount of sunlight received can mean grapes ripen differently.
And increasingly, there is another factor changing the equation: climate.
Research conducted here in Piemonte gives a remarkable picture of just how much harvest timing has moved. A study of vineyards in the Basso Monferrato examined harvest records between 1962 and 2019. Depending on the grape variety and vineyard, the beginning of harvest had advanced by approximately 11.6 to 34.2 days over those 58 years. Rising temperatures were strongly associated with that shift.
That is not a small adjustment. It means that knowledge passed from one generation to another - we usually pick this vineyard around this time - increasingly has to be interpreted rather than simply followed. And for a region like ours, that matters enormously.
Warmer conditions can accelerate sugar accumulation while acidity declines. But the skins, seeds and aromatic components of the grape may be developing according to a slightly different timetable. Research into changing vineyard climates increasingly describes this challenge as one of maintaining balance between sugar, acidity and phenolic and aromatic ripeness.
So the modern harvest question is subtly changing. Historically, in cooler years, the concern was often whether grapes would achieve sufficient ripeness before autumn weather deteriorated. Increasingly the question is now:
How long should we leave them?
From hands and baskets to machines and data
The physical business of harvest has changed too. For centuries the essential tools were wonderfully simple: hands, knives or small blades, baskets, tubs and human labour. Then came secateurs, tractors, trailers, better crates and eventually mechanical harvesters capable of removing fruit from vines at a speed no human picking team could approach.
For many producers, machinery transformed the economics and logistics of harvest. But technology has now moved beyond simply helping us pick grapes. It is beginning to help us understand them. Modern precision viticulture can use vineyard weather stations, soil and canopy sensors, satellite imagery, GPS mapping and drones carrying sophisticated cameras. Instead of seeing a vineyard simply as one block, growers can increasingly see differences in vigour, water stress and ripening within it.
Research into precision viticulture describes the principle rather neatly. It is doing the right thing, in the right place, at the right time. That could almost be a definition of good wine growing.
And now AI has arrived in the vineyard
Artificial intelligence is already here.
Computer-vision systems can analyse images of vines and identify bunches and berries. Machine-learning models are being developed to estimate yields. Drones and satellites can monitor vine vigour and stress across vineyards. Sensors can continuously collect information about temperature, moisture and the condition of the plant.
Increasingly, AI can take these enormous amounts of information and look for patterns that would be almost impossible for one person to identify manually. Recent research describes AI being used or developed for disease and pest detection, water-stress monitoring, irrigation and nutrient decisions, yield estimation and grape-quality prediction.
There have even been research systems using high-resolution drone photographs to estimate vineyard yields weeks before harvest. And for a farmer, that could be enormously useful. Imagine being able to identify a section of vineyard becoming water-stressed before it is obvious to the eye. Or recognising the early visual signs of disease across thousands of vines. Or combining years of weather data with the development of the fruit to understand how this vintage differs from previous ones.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about AI in wine is what it cannot do. Or at least not yet. It cannot walk into a vineyard carrying decades of memories of that particular piece of land. It cannot fully understand what a winemaker is trying to express in a particular wine. And a prediction remains exactly that - a prediction.
Even the latest scientific reviews of smart viticulture point to limitations including data quality, differences between vineyards and seasons, compatibility between systems and the need for technologies to prove themselves under real vineyard conditions. So perhaps AI will not replace the person walking the rows tasting grapes.
It will simply give that person more information. And there is something rather lovely about that.
The tools change. The question doesn't.
Imagine a winegrower standing in a Piemonte vineyard two hundred years ago. They would not have known the pH of their grapes. There would have been no satellite image, no hourly weather app, no digital map of vine vigour and certainly no algorithm predicting the ideal harvest window.
They would have looked at the sky. They would have tasted the grapes. They would have known what had happened in that vineyard the year before, and the year before that. And eventually they would have made a decision.
Today we can measure things they could never have imagined. We have laboratory analysis, detailed meteorological data, tractors, refrigeration, drones, satellites and now artificial intelligence. Yet eventually somebody still has to stand in a vineyard and say:
Tomorrow.
Harvest isn't simply the end of the vineyard year. It is the moment when twelve months of work, hundreds of small decisions and one unpredictable growing season finally become irreversible. Once the secateurs begin cutting, that vintage has made its choice. And so have we.
