NAPA: The valley's most consequential workday starts in the middle of the night. Long before sunrise, picking crews are already deep in the rows, working under lamps mounted on tractors and on their own foreheads, cutting clusters in the coldest air of the day. By the time the tasting rooms open, the most important work of the day is already done.
The reasons are practical before they are romantic. Grapes picked in the cool darkness arrive at the winery cold, which preserves acidity and protects delicate flavors. In a warming climate, the night shift is temperature management: the chill does work that refrigeration would otherwise have to do, and the fruit enters the cellar in better condition than any daytime pick could achieve.
But night harvest is also a labor story. As wine writer Randy Caparoso documented in his harvest portraits, the crews who pick at night are skilled workers making consequential decisions in the dark: which clusters are ripe, which rows are ready, how fast to move. The valley's celebrated wines begin with judgment calls made under headlamps.
The valley's second shift
There is a logistical logic too: wineries can run the crush pad around the clock during the compressed weeks of harvest. St. Helena's own visitor guides treat the after-dark harvest as one of the season's defining experiences, and it is not hard to see why: the work is slow, exacting, and done by people who have often done it for years.
Visitors see almost none of this. The Napa Valley of the brochures is golden hour and long lunches; the Napa Valley of September is floodlights and diesel at 2 a.m. That gap is worth noticing, because the wines in the glass at noon were decided, in large part, by people working while the valley slept.
When the sun comes up over the vineyards, the night's fruit is already cold in the cellar, and the crews are heading home as the tasting rooms unlock their doors. Harvest has two faces, and only one of them photographs well. The Chronicle's sympathies, this week, are with the other one.
