It’s a breezy Monday morning with cotton puff clouds scudding across the sky and the sounds of easy banter in the air.
A group of twenty Niagara College students is in school, but with clippers in their hands instead of pens, their professor standing in the vineyard instead of at the front of a classroom.
It’s not a one-time field trip, it’s where they are every Monday during harvest season, for a full dose of hands-on learning. Black netting that had been protecting the grapes from hungry birds has been lifted off, and all hands are at work, clipping golden green bunches of Vidal grapes into pink plastic bins on the ground.
“They’re learning while they’re here, and then they have to go back to the other classes,” explains Gavin Robertson, professor of winemaking at the college’s Teaching Winery.
“Most of the work will be done right here, in the 20 acres of vineyards on campus, because we have a diverse enough estate vineyard that we can pick pretty steadily. But we also partner with some of our graduates who now work at other wineries,” Robertson says.
“We’ll show up as a picking crew and pick two or three tonnes for them, and then follow the intake, so the students get access to other winemakers’ brains and other technology and crush pad operations,” he adds.
“It’s fun,” says first year student Caitlyn Ensinger, adding “It’s a little hard on the knees but it’s good. We get the hands-on work and then the classroom work to go along with it. So we get to apply what we learn in the classroom. So it’s nice.”
Fellow student Cameron Lougheed agrees the work takes physical effort.
“It’s a little hard squatting down for most of the day but as long as you enjoy it, especially with the people you’re with, the time flies, and you’re very focused on the grapes themselves, and what’s good and what’s bad.”
Lougheed used to work indoors. Now, “waking up, seeing something as beautiful as this is a good change for the better,” he says.
“I’m definitely mostly interested in the viticulture side, but learning the winery cellar-hand stuff is amazing. I think this whole program does a great job in showing you every aspect of winery work.”
Winemaker Allison Findlay says range is important.
“We cover the vineyard, the winery, as well as sales, marketing and sensory analysis,” she says.
“You don’t really know what direction you want to go until you’re in it. For example, I wanted to be a sommelier, I wanted to wear cute dresses and work at fancy restaurants. And now I live in the cellar, and I love it, and I couldn’t be happier, but I didn’t know that was an option for me until I learned what the cellar is all about.”
The students load the bins laden with fruit into a utility vehicle that takes it to the crush pad, where the grapes go into a one tonne bin, onto a forklift, and into the winery for pressing.
Staff and students work together. Findlay helps guide the grape clusters out of the big bin on their way to the press. She says the hands-on work “is very important, because the students have constant exposure to it, in the vineyard and the winery, and it really helps them learn faster.”
All of the staff working at the Teaching Winery are alumni of the program, as is Findlay herself, and its graduates are woven into the fabric of the broader industry in Niagara and beyond.
“I did a very quick survey of wine country in Ontario and we definitely had grads in winemaker, assistant winemaker or vineyard management positions at 60 or 65 of the roughly 100 wineries in the province,” Robertson says with some pride.
“And that doesn’t include cellar hands. Right now, there’s probably an NC grad in just about every winery doing harvest,” he adds.
Robertson rattles off the names of just some of the many Niagara College grads who are at wineries big and small. They include winemakers Nicholas Gizuk at Inniskillin, Dean Stoyka at Stratus, Ryan Gibson and Ben Minaker at Peller in Grimsby, Alex Baines at Hidden Bench, Greg Yemen at Organised Crime, Vincenzo De Simone, who is both winemaker and owner of De Simone Vineyards, and Jessica Otting at Tawse, where NC alumni Augusta Vanmuyen is the vineyard manager.
They and many others started where these students are today, and chances are these first-year students will end up in various roles in the industry too.
For now, you’ll see them out in the vineyard at the college every Monday, until “the grapes are gone,” says Robertson.
Heartbeat of the Harvest will return in late October, as the season approaches its close.