Labour

Viticulture, unlike winemaking, has long required a substantial input of labour. The Romans used slaves while monks and monasteries played an important part in medieval vine-growing. A peasant class was long necessary to maintain viticulture in Europe, and increasingly vineyard labour was paid for by leasing part of the vineyard to the labourer, share-cropping or, in French, métayage. The close association between vine-growing and humans began to alter towards the end of the 20th century, however, mainly because of changes in technology.

There have traditionally been three levels of labour input to viticulture: man alone, man plus draught animal, and man plus machines. In the future, robots may do some vineyard tasks. In ancient vineyards, all work was done by man, which consisted of weed control, pruning, trimming, desuckering, layering, and harvesting. The labour input was high, and vineyards on the plains required between 70 and 80 man-days per hectare per year. This means that any one person might tend about 3 ha/7 acres, with due allowance for using other labour at times of peak demand such as harvesting and pruning. The yield from such vineyards was not high compared with modern standards. A generous 33.5 hl/ha (2 tons/acre) meant that one man’s labour might produce a maximum of about 15 tonnes of grapes. For hillside vineyards, one man might tend only about 100 sq m of vineyard, although this was not necessarily full-time work, with a likely output of tens of kilograms of grapes per person per year. Such vineyards relying totally on manual labour are increasingly rare, as the price of labour has increased much more than the price of wine, but some may be found all around the Mediterranean.

Intensive labour input continued for many vineyards up until the mid to late 19th century, when the invasion of powdery mildew, downy mildew, and phylloxera led to the need for spraying, and rootstocks. Previously many vineyards had been planted haphazardly without rows, and with high density, almost like a field of wheat. As need be, unhealthy vines were replaced by layering from adjacent vines. With the need to spray, and also for ploughing, draught animals became more common, not only horses but also mules and oxen. Indeed, milk cows were also used; in France’s Auvergne, for example, cows provided meat, milk, and labour. Vines then needed to be planted in rows to make easy the passage of the animal, and there were typically many fewer plants per hectare because of the cost of grafting plants on rootstocks. One horse was able to work 7 ha, and one man was needed for every 3 ha. A typical family farm consisted of about 7 ha of vines, one horse with two drivers, and one labourer.

After the Second World War, the pattern of viticulture changed in France and elsewhere with the widespread introduction of mechanization. This was no simple matter, as there were conflicts between generations of farmers about replacing horses with tractors, and substantial changes in the support services in rural villages. Mechanics and fuel salesmen replaced blacksmiths and fodder merchants. In the end, economic necessity determined the future; one man and a tractor was now able to tend 30 ha of vineyards, although with manual labour including pruning, trimming, and harvesting, 1 ha still required 43 days’ work throughout the year.

In the 1960s, the mechanization revolution intensified. Under-vine ploughing had been largely replaced by herbicides, and then there was the introduction of mechanical harvesting followed by that of mechanical pruning. Some sprays were even applied from the air, using aeroplanes or helicopters. There are some vineyards in south-eastern Australia where the total annual labour input is less than 50 man-hours per hectare: all operations are carried out mechanically including harvesting and pruning; spray units treat multiple rows at once; and weed control is by herbicides. On large estates, one worker is required for each 30 ha with this degree of mechanization, and the output can be more than 500 tonnes of wine grapes. This figure, compared with less than 15 tonnes per person about a century earlier, demonstrates how labour productivity has increased through mechanization. A counter-trend, albeit generally on a smaller scale, is the move towards organic and biodynamic grape growing, the latter in particular requiring considerable human input.

It seems likely, however, that an increasing proportion of vineyard tasks will be mechanized, even in countries where labour resources are not necessarily limiting or expensive. Mechanization is seen to offer benefits of timeliness as well as of economics, which encourage its further adoption. However, on a few estates where the slopes are too steep for mechanized ploughing, or where there is a wish to avoid soil compaction, notably in alsace and burgundy, and increasingly in Bordeaux’s upper echelons, producers have returned to using ploughs pulled by draught animals such as horses.

Once the grapes have been delivered to the winery, winemaking requires relatively little labour. A winemaker is required to make decisions and, increasingly, program a computer which may control such operations as temperature control and racking wine from one container to another (see information technology).

Only barrel maturation and, particularly, lees stirring require much manual labour (see cellar work). Otherwise, cleaning is the chief manual operation.

1. Coombe, B. G., and Dry, P. R. (eds.), Viticulture, ii: Practices (Adelaide, 1992).
2. Galet, P., Précis de viticulture (7th edn, Montpellier, 2000).