The focus in harvest season in Niagara-on-the-Lake may be on picking the grapes, but there is so much more going on. Preparation inside the winery, analysis in the laboratory and critical decision making.
This week in our series Heartbeat of the Harvest we peek behind the scenes at Stratus Vineyards to see how it all comes together.



Alchemy, artistry and science coalesce in winemaking — and never more so than at harvest time.

The magic of harvest is much more than that pivotal moment in the vineyard when the grapes are picked. It starts long before and extends long beyond.

The focus for the first grapes to be picked for harvest 2024 at Stratus Vineyards is an ancestral field blend.

“We don’t hear about field blends here very much, they’re quite rare. I got the idea from Europe. I was on a trip to northern Italy and Portugal tasting wines about five years ago and I was tasting a lot of field blends. And I was like, we don’t really see that in North America. It’d be great for us to make a couple,” explains Stratus winemaker Dean Stoyka.

Field blends are an ancient style of wine, made by picking a melange of different grape varietals from a single vineyard or field and fermenting them together at the same time. The wine is slightly effervescent, fruity and dry.

For the Stratus ancestral field blend, Stoyka uses Chardonnay, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier.

Determining when the grapes are just right is a matter of taste, technology and teamwork.

The lab is where it all happens. It’s perched on the top floor of the winery with panoramic windows providing expansive views of the surrounding vineyards — and filled with scientific gear and gadgets.

“We bring the berries in from the vineyard, what we do is we go choose the same two rows every single week, and we take a 200-berry sample. We walk down the same row, taking from different parts of the clusters, so the front, the top, the bottom, the back, all different areas, so you have a good representation of what we have from the vineyard,” he explains.

“And then we come in here to the lab. What we really care about are the flavours and the ripeness of the grapes,” he adds.

Stoyka is squishing a handful of Chardonnay grapes in a simple plastic sandwich bag into a mushy pulp, making juice for tasting.

He tips the juice from the sandwich bag into a beaker, then pours it into a glass test tube and puts it into a centrifuge to spin the solids out. Assistant winemaker Lauren Barker and winegrowing manager Liam Reeves are there to help with the assessment of the grapes.

The juice is poured into tasting glasses.

“We always start with the aroma, you can smell it’s pretty lemony and kind of like a Granny Smith apple,” says Stoyka.

Then they all taste the juice, pleased with the flavour. Full ripeness is not quite there, but it’s getting much closer.

“We want more pear and some peach notes. It’s getting there. We definitely want more flavour development. These grapes are just past ripe to make a good, traditional-method sparkling wine, which we want more neutral. But a field blend is a fruit-driven wine, so we’re waiting for the flavours to get a little bit more floral, even tropical,” Stoyka adds.

Flavour is paramount, but there are other measures to consider.

Five grapes have been set to the side.

“We squeeze those grapes individually and look at the colour of the pulp and the skins,” he says.

“We’re looking for translucence, so you can start to see the seeds actually through the berry. The more translucent it is, the more ripe. The colour of the pulp now is a little bit green, we want to see a yellow colour develop. And we look at the colour of the seeds, we’re looking for brown. These ones are brown, but they have some tinges of yellow still.”

“We’re getting close, probably next week.”

Moving on from what they can see, smell and taste, the team now employs advanced technology to score a myriad of markers in the grape juice. Senses are important, but scores matter too.

Next the juice is fed into a fancy machine from Austria.

“It’s going to do our whole juice panel, it’s going to get our sugar level, malic acid, tartaric acid, the whole breakdown of what’s in this juice. It would take one of us most of the day to do this, but this machine is going to do it in mere moments,” says Stoyka.

Sure enough, a minute and a half after the liquid is injected into the machine, an array of technical numbers appear on the screen.

“Afterwards, the three of us have a little meeting. We’ll compare all that data to the previous week, and to historical data, and then we’ll make our decisions on where we are with ripeness. We’ll do this every Tuesday all the way until probably the end of November, when the last grapes are off the vines. The whole process is very precise.”

While the grapes have been ripening on the vines, and the testing has been going on in the lab, everything inside the winery has been readied to receive them.

“Three weeks ago we emptied our large barrels and amphoras and we bottled the wine that had been aging in them. It’s part of harvest prep, to make room for the new vintage,” says Stoyka.

“All the mechanical equipment has been cleaned and tuned up, so everything is ready. We do a lot of preventative maintenance, because once we’re in the thick of harvest we don’t have time for delays.”

A week later Stoyka and his team repeat their analysis, and when they meet this time, they decide it’s time to pull the trigger and pick the grapes.

As the grapes for the ancestral field blend come into the winery for pressing and fermentation, the team knows they are just the first in a succession this season and harvest is truly underway.

Next: Every step is time sensitive during harvest season, bringing a certain intensity to the action. Next, we get a glimpse into some of the logistics involved as the grapes roll in and the winemaking gets underway at Trius Winery.  

By the numbers
Acres to harvest: 55
Varietals: 16
Yield: 138 tonnes
Production: 10,000 cases/90,000 litres
Vineyard Labour: 7 workers, with additional labour as needed
Handpicked: 130 tonnes
Machine Harvested: 0 tonnes