The blue elephant

The other day I set out to find a grape-harvesting machine and failed, so when I saw this one I swiftly stopped the car and jumped out. Unfortunately it was rather far away, so this is zoomed and cropped. I chose this photo because the person gives a good idea of the scale and unwieldiness of these machines (he's the tractor driver, who has got down to guide the machine driver through the tight turn at the end of the row). Good luck if you get stuck behind one on the road!

They were a very rare sight when we first moved here, but now they are ubiquitous. The economic case is unanswerable -- renting a machine saves about 50% of the cost over employing human pickers, and you'll save even more if your domaine is big enough to justify buying one. It also makes picking much quicker and hence you can be more flexible in timing, picking the grapes exactly at maturity. Our little patch of vines used to take half a dozen of us a morning to pick; the machine does it in 20 minutes and doesn't demand a copious meal with lots of wine afterwards.

Of course, that was the best bit ... in the days of manual harvesting the village filled up with a coachload of Spanish pickers, generations of the same families who'd been coming for years. Lots of socialising in the square, especially on Saturday evenings when the guitars would come out, and a big communal meal to celebrate the end of the harvest. Now, if you're not directly involved you hardly notice the harvest happening -- just the distant whine of machines in the silence of early morning (with powerful headlights you can harvest all night if you want, and it's beneficial to pick white grapes when it's cool). There are still a few pickers because you can't use a machine if you need whole bunches for carbonic maceration; they are mostly Poles and other eastern Europeans now.

Edit: there's a video here showing a machine at work (commentary in French). It also mentions that, unsurprisingly, these machines were invented in France and 99% of machines in the world are made here.