Grape Harvest at the Dreistand Winery

I’m never good at waking up early, but I had to make an exception. We arrived early at the Dreistand Winery in Wädenswil to pick grapes, learn about their wines, and taste them. After they gave us a bag filled with various goodies, including a pair of pruning shears, we headed to one of the three vineyards where they grow their grapes. There, we would pick a few bunches of Blauburgunder, also known as Pinot Noir, under the guidance of the staff before they were turned into must at the winery.

Out in the vineyard, I felt an incredible sense of satisfaction while harvesting the grapes. The first bunches fell into the crate a little more slowly, more leisurely, and with greater care to ensure they were cut properly. Some of the grapes had to be tossed onto the ground because they were either already dried out or had been withered and were no longer whole. Some other grapes looked as if they’d been plucked from an artistic depiction of a Dionysian ritual: a sight that makes you admire nature even more. At some point, after we’d already picked enough grapes to fill a few crates, our time participating in the harvest had come to an end. When we weighed the grapes, the scale showed about 80 kilograms, and right then we were offered our first glass of wine: the winery’s white Müller-Thurgau. Although it was made from different grapes, the wine now tasted a little better since I had finally seen more stages of its production.

After the grapes were weighed, they were transported to the machine that separates the grape clusters from the berries and produces the must, and then they were transferred through a pipe to a tank that holds the must until it becomes wine. After touring the facilities on the ground floor of the winery, we then went down to the basement, where all the tanks for storing and cooling the wine were located, as well as the entire collection of French oak barrels used for aging, primarily red wines.

While we continued tasting the rosé in the cellar, the must from the grapes we had harvested a little earlier made its way from the upper floor through another pipe, which this time nearly drenched us, but the winemaker stopped it just in time, and in the end we tasted the must in our glasses rather than having it on our clothes. Aside from this little anecdote, it’s impressive that a winery of this size has such a modern production facility. Then, with the delicious must in our glasses, we went to the bottling room, which is particularly interesting because they use aluminum caps instead of corks, which are customized according to the specific needs of each wine. This means that they aren’t all the same tightness or maintain the same distance from the wine inside the bottle.

No matter where you are in the world, I believe it’s worth taking a day to pick grapes from a vineyard and see how one of the world’s oldest beverages is made. I don’t think you always have to work hard to enjoy something nice, but taking part in a process like this gives the experience a sense of community that I think we’re missing today. On that September day at Lake Zurich, I truly felt like I was savoring the wine.