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Picking grapes

· 3 min read
Patrick M. Slattery
Patrick M. Slattery
Maintainer of FutureOps.info

Picking grapes at Lincoln Peak Vineyard​

This happened at: Lincoln Peak Vineyard on September 13th 2025.

This is a vineyard of about 10 acres of vines in New Haven Vermont just north of Middlebury on Route 7. We were on their mailing list and got an email invite to some of their picking days. Being a small vineyard they partially depend on volunteers to help pick the grapes.

https://www.lincolnpeakvineyard.com/pickwithus

We are proud to be a community-picked vineyard. Each fall we welcome volunteers to help us pick these beautiful grapes and start them on their journey to becoming wine. We plan to be picking fruit from the end of August until mid October, and the picking schedule will be dictated by the ripeness of the grapes and the weather. We will aim to harvest in the cool hours of morning, starting at 8am and finishing before noon, and generally will not harvest in the rain or other inclement weather. We provide gloves and pruners - and welcome all of our harvesters to celebrate their labor and community of fellow pickers with lunch and wine around midday.

Growing up in Ireland we used to pick a lot of wild fruit to make jams and jellies with but there were no grapes growing outside of greenhouses in Ireland so I decided to give it a go to see what picking grapes was like.

We were picking Marquette grapes in the lower vineyard, close to Route 7. These grapes were destined to become the 2025 vintage of Starlight Dry Rosé.

Here are some pictures of the vines before we started picking:
Before picking Before picking 2

We were picking the grapes into these tubs, we picked roughly a ton of grapes in two hours:
Picking tubs

Here you can see the vines after we had picked all the grapes (We didn't pick the row on the right, they weren't ready yet):
After picking

Here we see the grapes being squeezed to get all the juice out, the machine, as they described it, has a large pneumatic bag that gently squeezes the grapes:
Squeezing the juice

The initial results of our picking:
Fresh grape juice

Apparently it takes about 8 months for the wine to be ready to drink so I'll check back in with them in May 2026.

I did buy a bottle of last years vintage of Starlight before I left so that we wouldn't have to wait so long to try some.

Starlight - Dry Rosé