There’s a whole lot going on at the production facility at Trius during harvest season, and Emma Garner is in the thick of it. Her day starts early and finishes late. She’s up at 5:30 in the morning and on site at Trius until 6 p.m. — and that’s on days when everything goes smoothly. The ripening grapes in the vineyard dictate the schedule and the pace. 

“Once the fruit’s ready, we’ve got to go. That’s the biggest thing.” 

Garner orchestrates the complex processes at the Trius production site in her role as director of winemaking for Andrew Peller Ltd., working very closely with the winemaking teams from both Peller and Trius. Their premium wines are made here. She is also the winemaker for Thirty Bench.

In a masterful understatement, Garner allows that “my day is pretty busy, for sure, it’s a bit busy.”

The day starts with a meeting, with key players from all areas, some in person, some remote.

“Every morning we’re reviewing what grapes have come in, the plans for them, and then considering everything that’s coming in that day. In my office, I have a big schedule for a five-day span of all the fruit that we have planned to come in, and all of the presses we have available. We’re making sure we’re maximizing those, making sure we’re not over-committing and making sure we’re going to be able to get everything completed,” she explains. 

“So we will have that conversation and then the winemaking team here at Trius will go through and taste all of the juices that have come in, and all of the fermenters that are going, and make decisions about whether or not the fermenter needs food or whether or not that juice is ready to rack. So there’s the grape part of the scheduling, but then there’s all the downstream steps that happen here.” 

Planning is one thing and responding to inevitable hiccups is another. It adds up to countless decisions each day. 

“We have things scheduled, but obviously things change,” she says. “It’s a big logistics game. So say we’ve got our schedule and we’ve got our tentative times. We’ve got our tentative tonnages, we’ve got our tentative processing plan. But then the grower ends up having to start picking later because it’s too dewy, so that shifts the schedule.”

There’s a huge domino effect to any one wrinkle.

“It could be we’re getting less tonnage than we thought, or at a different time. We’re constantly juggling. It’s a matrix,” Garner explains.

“Yesterday, for instance, our press broke down. It’s equipment that you don’t use for eight months of the year, then all of a sudden you get this period of time where it’s in use all the time.”

“We’ve got four days worth of fruit scheduled to come in. So now we have to get in touch with growers, we’ve got to change our plans. We have to use different presses. We’ve got to rejig things, and that had a three day effect.” 

Garner takes it all in stride. “That’s all part of it, right? That’s what kind of makes it fun. There’s always something exciting going on.” 

“Last night, the alarm was going off, so I got the call to help navigate that. Someone had set it for the night, not realizing that when harvest is on, we have people here all the time.” 

The operation runs 20 or 24 hours a day, and will process 2,500 tonnes of grapes. 

On this particular day, the broken press is back online and the schedule is packed.  

“We’ve got two more days of picking for our Methode Champenois — grapes destined for our sparkling program. We’ve got Sauvignon Blanc coming in today and we’ve got some Pinot Noir coming in from Clarke farm. All kinds of stuff on the go,” Garner says with a smile.   

A huge truck rolls in, its big black bins filled to the brim with Sauvignon Blanc grapes harvested that morning. The grapes are weighed and the juice is sampled for its sugar levels. Growers are paid based on tonnage on brix levels. 

These grapes were machine harvested, which Garner says works out well for Sauvignon Blanc.

“It helps extract some of that flavour, because there’s some juice already coming out,” she explains. 

The truck lumbers off to the press house next, where the bins are dumped into a stainless steel hopper. It’s a process that will be repeated many times, every day.

“It takes us about an hour and a half to dump the whole truckload, so we try to schedule about two hours for each one,” Garner says.

Once the grapes are dumped into the hopper, “there’s a spinning auger inside, which feeds them into the winery, into one of our presses, then goes into a cold stainless steel tank. We’ll settle it so we get clear juice, and then we’ll rack that juice off the solids in probably five to seven days, and then we’ll ferment it.” 

Meanwhile over in the yard, bunches of Pinot Noir grapes handpicked early that morning wait in insulated bins, keeping them cool. Four hundred kilograms will be kept as whole bunches and the rest will be crushed and then all of it put into huge wood fermenters.  Every grape variety calls for very specific and often different treatment. 

There’s a lot to worry about, a lot of balls to keep in the air, but Garner moves through the day and the challenges with an air of calm assurance. The one thing she may dread is the sound of rainfall waking her at night. Then she’d have to decide whether to delay picking, or cancel the day, and manage all the ripple effects of those decisions.

But this season has been generous with the weather so far.

“It’s been amazing,” she beams. 

“Good weather gives me the flexibility to decide what I want to pick on a given day because it’s ready, not because I have to, because there’s four days of rain forecast,” she says.  Even the rain that came earlier this week hasn’t dampened her outlook. “The season is still shaping up to be fantastic. That rain helped to give the late reds a watering, and has now put us in a position to finish up bringing in the aromatics.”

Next week in our series Heartbeat of the Harvest, we’ll visit the vineyards at Niagara College, where harvest is all about hands-on learning, and program graduates have fanned out into successful careers in the industry.