Field Note Friday: Picking Cabernet by Hand

By Len Brutocao, Director of Vineyard Operations

This week we hand picked Cabernet Sauvignon on the steep hillside rows at Contento Vineyard, some for our own wine and a few bins for a New York customer who has been buying our grapes since 2004.

This Week at Brutocao
• Hand-picked Cabernet Sauvignon on Contento’s steep hillside rows Wednesday morning
• Short, steep rows by the wedding site are no place for machines
• Some fruit ships to a New York customer we’ve supplied since 2004
• Dry ice on every bin keeps the grapes cold cross-country
• Featured: Legacy Cabernet Sauvignon, hand-picked from Contento Block 6

We were up on Contento Vineyard early Wednesday morning, picking Cabernet Sauvignon by hand. If you’ve been to a wedding up there, you know the spot: the hilltop with the view, and the short, steep rows of Cabernet that fall away below it. Those rows don’t give us a choice. The picking machine can’t work that kind of slope, and the rows are too short to turn it around in anyway. So it’s crews, picking knives, and picking bins, the way it’s been done for a long time.

I don’t mind that one bit. Hand picking is slower, but it’s more selective. A picker’s eyes and hands catch what a machine can’t—a raisined cluster, a late bunch that never caught up, a leaf that doesn’t belong. On a hillside like this, where the fruit comes in small and concentrated, that extra care shows up in the glass.

Part of Wednesday’s pick stays with us, and part of it heads to New York, to a customer who has been buying grapes from us since 2004. Their fruit goes into special shipping bins, and before the bins go out we lay dry ice across the top. It keeps the grapes cold and keeps any wild fermentation from getting started on the ride across the country. The boys pitched in, pulling leaves out of those bins and looking for over-ripe or under-ripe fruit—not glamorous work, but important. Nobody wants to ship leaves to New York.

There was a time when selling grapes was most of what we did. We used to sell about 75% of what we grew across our 450 acres. In the early 2000s we chose to keep that fruit and make it into our own wine, which became our Bliss brand. It’s one of the best decisions this family has made. Today we sell to just a handful of long-time customers, people we’ve known for years and like working with, and that’s the way we want it.

Contento means a lot to us beyond the vines. We’ve hosted hundreds of weddings on that hilltop, and in a few weeks it’s our family’s turn: my brother David’s daughter is getting married up there. I’ll be looking out over those same Cabernet rows in a suit instead of work boots.

If you want to taste what those hillside blocks can do, pour our Legacy Collection Cabernet Sauvignon. The 2020 was hand-picked from Block 6 at Contento, spent 28 months in barrel, and we made fewer than 100 cases, and they’re selling fast. It’s a wine built for patience, and it’s drinking beautifully with a little air right now.

Cheers,
Len Brutocao
3rd Generation & Vineyard Manager, Brutocao Family Vineyards