Wineries Face Hiring Challenges for the Harvest

Local and H-2A workers are in short supply as demand for NoMi wines grows

By Ross Boissoneau | Sept. 28, 2024

It seems like everyone has a “Help Wanted” sign in the window these days. Whether in restaurants or retail, accounting or manufacturing, there is a shortage of workers. The farming industry is not immune, including grape harvesting and processing at area wineries.

With a year’s worth of hard work on the vine, wineries know they have to fill in the gaps or lose out on harvesting some of their crop.

Gabe Marzonie at Chateau Grand Traverse says harvest typically runs six to eight weeks, depending on the weather and the size of the crop. “It always depends on September,” he says. The harvest typically starts sometime in the middle of the month, he says, and it ends in early October.

As of print time, many wineries have begun the harvest, citing the lack of rainfall and usually warm September weather as the impetus to start as early as the week of Sept. 16.

When harvest starts, the days are as long as there is fruit, workers, and most importantly, light. “You start when it’s light. That’s around 7:30-8 in the fall,” says Mike Laing, co-owner of Mawby.

Struggling with Staffing

The work season may be short, but it is intense, both in terms of hours and labor. Those factors, combined with the seasonality of the job, can make it hard to staff up at just the right time. There are tried and true methods to find reliable talent, and when those fail, wineries are starting to get creative.

“We have a full vineyard team and bring in support for harvest,” says Marzonie. “The ideal number is 16.”

How close Chateau Grand Traverse gets to that ideal number varies, but it’s all but certain they won’t get all the way there pulling from the local talent pool.

“A lot of wineries use contracted migrant labor,” says Marzonie, including Chateau Grand Traverse. That enables the vineyards to bring in H-2A Temporary Agricultural Workers when needed, though the process is not as easy as it once was.

Laing tells us that “the cost of H-2A workers keeps rising. The government keeps raising the rate. The yields are low, the price of labor high. Everybody’s dealing with it.”

Shady Lane Cellars Vineyard Manager Andy Fles concurs. “It is expensive. The federal government sets the wage and forces us to match that wage. … It’s much more challenging now,” he says of hiring. “There’s a lot less seasonal movement of harvest and field workers. There used to be a lot [of workers] moving around looking for work.”

Climate change is affecting the amount of work those traditional crews can find elsewhere. Fles says that citrus greening, which kills the citrus trees, is spreading more quickly, leading to less work in the south.

“Historically we relied on the migrant population,” says Laing. “People would work [across] the country. Oranges in Florida in April, peaches in Georgia, then work their way north.”

Laing says hiring also became more challenging when the Trump administration began to crack down on deportations and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids scared the migrant population. “Some migrant families put roots down,” he says, meaning there were fewer workers seeking seasonal work.

Getting Creative

When hiring locally and H-2A staffing isn’t enough, there are other options. For example, Chateau Grand Traverse doesn’t rely solely on its staff or outside workers. It has a not-so-secret weapon: Some 60 percent of its grapes are harvested by a mechanical picker.

Marzonie says that is particularly important when harvesting the winery’s flagship late harvest Riesling grapes, which need to be picked at just the right time. “If we had to wait and see, then there’s a cold snap or rain coming, [so] it’s more efficient to take the mechanical harvester up and down the rows,” he says.

This part of the harvest is not only a question of how long it would take to gather the workers, but also the time spent in the vines. For a team of contract workers, the task would take a day and a quarter. On the other hand, the mechanical harvester takes only a couple hours.

Unlike Chateau Grand Traverse, all the grapes for Mawby are picked by hand. “For bubbly, we like our fruit hand-picked,” Laing says. The picked fruit is dumped into bins and pressed immediately. The warmer the weather, the more quickly the fruit will spoil, so it’s important to go from field to processing as fast as they can get it there.

Mawby’s staff of one year-round vineyard manager and three H-2A workers can’t handle all the harvesting and processing, “so we need to work with a vineyard management company,” says Laing.

Mawby also relies on grapes from outside its vineyard—“We also buy a lot of fruit,” Laing says—lessening the need for harvesters, though not processors.

All About Timing

Processing begins as soon as they have enough fruit. “On a typical day, pressing starts around 10 or 11,” says Laing, as by then they should have two tons of whole clusters of grapes.

With each lug—the big yellow bins you see holding grapes—weighing around 40 pounds when full, that translates to 100 lugs picked in two or three hours.

Laing says there are a number of variables that impact the harvest, including whether there is fruit left from the day before, as they don’t want to get too far ahead in the rows and have the fruit begin to juice—in that case, it’s better to stay on the vine another day.

Other variables include size of the crew, their speed, and the weather. The latter can affect things in numerous ways. For example, when it rains during harvest, that slows everything down.

Another factor in harvest is timing the picking and the processing. “We don’t want the fruit to juice in the bins. We want the grapes to be crushed in the press,” says Fles. “The longer it [grapes] is in the bins, the more they’ll juice. Speed is critical.”

A Growing Need

One area in which vineyard experts are largely in agreement is that those doing the picking and processing need little (if any) time learning how to do the job. That’s in part because the vast majority of them have done this work previously.

But the veteran crews are not only growing scarcer—they are beginning to age out. Like the skilled construction trades, those who remain in the harvest workforce are getting older, and there aren’t a lot of younger workers replacing them.

“The fieldwork population is aging,” Fles says. “We’re not seeing the next wave happening.”

That reality seems unlikely to change. “Farming and agricultural work is not the number one thing people look to do,” notes Marzonie.

The drop in interested employees is misaligned with the growing popularity of the northern Michigan wine industry. While our area is still less recognized for its wineries than, say, California, Marzonie believes those who might give it short shrift should realize how mature the local viticultural area really is.

“Most look at Napa as the Holy Grail. It’s good, but many of them started in the late ’70s. Duckhorn is one of my favorites, and it started in 1976.” In contrast, Ed O’Keefe Jr. started Chateau Grand Traverse two years prior to that. This year, the winery is celebrating a half-century of winemaking.

That maturity and the fact many area wineries win awards in various competitions means the industry will continue to grow. As such, there will always be a need for harvest workers, be they full-time staff or part-timers hired specifically to walk the rows of vines and pick the grapes for processing.