Harvesting by Hand

Harvesting by hand brings a human touch to our wines. It means opening our estates to people we’d probably never meet otherwise, respecting the fruit we’ve nurtured all year long, bringing life to the villages where we live.

The songs in the vineyards, the evening drinks with the grape-pickers are worth all the Pellencs (a brand of grape harvesting machine, ed.) in the world.

At Contrastes, we believe that machine-harvesting grapes is incompatible with natural wine, its spirit and the delicacy that our wines embody.

However, there’s an economic reality that we are the first to witness: harvesting by hand is 3 to 5 times more expensive than harvesting by machine. For many young estates, it’s a huge effort that we want to acknowledge. Our specifications are as follows: no wines made from grapes harvested by machine at Contrastes.

The same applies to wine merchants. If there are winemakers who wear two hats (merchant/winemaker), only their estate wines will be tasted at Contrastes.

Only wines made with traded grapes that we call “climatic”, that save us, that are not our usual practice, that get us through the year, are accepted...because not having any wine to sell for a whole year when you are already economically fragile is certain death!

At Contrastes, we are not the judge of right and wrong. We strive to defend the values we share while remaining consistent with our realities.

Translated from the original text by the Contrastes team

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