Worldwide in the northern hemisphere, September and October are months of the annual grape harvest.

According to the United Nations, grapes are among the top 5 fruits consumed in the world (by total acreage and harvest volume) -- the others are apples, oranges, bananas, and mangoes.

But is there any fruit finding more applications for human consumption than the red grape?  Fresh, dried as raisins, juices, flavors, fragrances, extracts, supplements, seed oil and wine.

For centuries, grapes have been favored in this variety of formats more extensively than any other fruit.

A medieval grape harvest

Courtesy of Wikipedia

The Harvest Season

• vineyards in Cyprus begin harvesting as early as July

• In California some sparkling wine grapes are harvested in late July to early August at a slightly unripe point to help maintain acidity in the wine

• most northern hemisphere harvesting occurs during September and October

• in Germany, United States and Canada, ice wine grapes are harvested during the first freezing temperatures of November or December

• most southern hemisphere harvesting occurs between the months of February and April

A mechanical grape harvester

The "Picking Point": What Measures Ripeness?

• tasters use the sugar and acid levels of the grape as a guide in determining ripeness

• winemakers may taste the grape to get this gauge but more modern winemaking would use a refractometer to measure sugar levels by the grape's brix

• others place an emphasis on the "physiological" ripeness of the grape, usually in the form of tannins and phenolic acids

A sloped riverside vineyard in Germany too steep for mechanical harvesting.

It must be hand-picked.

The Harvest

• A mechanical vine harvester works by beating the vine with rubber sticks to drop the grapes onto a conveyor belt leading to a holding bin

• One of the benefits of mechanical harvesting is the relatively low cost of running a harvester 24 hours a day with a capacity to pick 80-200 tons of grapes,in contrast to the 1-2 tons that an experienced human picker could do in one day

• Specialty grapes, like those used for ice wine and other dessert wines such as French Sauternes, must be hand-picked

Next!

• grapes are the most intensively studied fruit in medical research -- we'll look at the 2009 trends
• resveratrol from red grape skins and seeds is the phytochemical in fruit research most advanced toward a health claim for effectiveness against human diseases -- see what's new!

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