Grape Harvest in Russia

Pickers in the Kuban (Russia)I shot these pictures in the flatlands of Kuban, in the western Russian Caucase. We were driving along large blocks of vineyards when I spotted the pickers in the distance. I walked to them, they were working for a sovkhoz (industrial winery) named Chernomovsky and the variety here is Krasnostop, a quite common variety grown by the big wineries.
At least 8 tractors with gondolas and pickers were positionned in the vineyard. The pickers seemed to be sometimes ethnic Russians, sometimes Caucasians from further east, depending of the harvesting teams. Sign of the times, I saw one of the young women pause on the side and chat on her cell phone.
Hand picking is still common in the large vineyards of Russia, because the wages are still low in the region. Some of these workers come from the neighboring provinces of Daghestan, Chechnya or Uzbekistan. They find here work with higher wages compared with their country/province of origin, and some may have fled the violent civil wars of the south-eastern Caucase.

Pause Workers on a row The vines outstretch their foliage at maybe 2,5 meters high, this Krasnostop variety seems to grow very easily, and this may be also due to the rich earth of this Kuban plain. Full gondola This gondola is full to the top with Krasnostop grapes brought one by one by the pickers. The distance between rows is quite large, as it is often the norm in Russian vineyard farms, as to allow normal-size tractors to pass. Team with tractorThe tractors moves from time to time, the driver making sure that it's ahead enough so that workers can easily find grapes to pick. Veiled pickersThis picture is interesting for two things : first, the foliage of the Krasnostop variety grows very high here, and it seems particularly bushy on the sides as well. Secondly, you can see masked or veiled women in this picking team which seemed composed exclusively of eastern-Caucasians. I thought initially that this may be to protect themselves from chemicals on the leaves, but some of the veils seemed elaborate and religiously-motivated (and none of the men here wore any face protection). The tractor driver helping on the gondola A full bucket of Krasnostop Young picker Woman holding Krasnostop grapes Machine harvest Machine harvesting is also very widespread, and trucks like for example this soviet-era truck funnel the grapes continuously to the facility. Again, this vineyard is planted in the rich earth of the Kuban plain, as often for the industrial wineries here. Checking the work There's a driver at the wheel and another worker standing outside who checks in the back of the combine if everything is going fine with the grapes and the trellising. Pouring a full load of clusters Harvest monument We stumbled upon this odd soviet-era monument with fountain (on the right) while driving on a road in Kuban. The whole thing was an ode to harvest and grapes, and there were a few stalls built with the same materials as the sculpture to (apparently) sell grapes to the passing travellers.

Comments

[Niels Jensen]

Thanks very much for this blog. As a California home winemaker, these descriptions and photos of wine making are a wondeful exposure to what wine making looks like in other parts of the world!