10 years of progress for mechanical harvest cleaning

Abstract

The grape harvester machine is an essential compound of the vineyard equipment. There has been a constant progress in the performance of mechanical harvesting, in terms of quality and respect of the berries. The three main manufacturers have constantly improved the picking head of their respective machines, but the main progress has come from the sorting systems they have implemented on board. What is really the quality gain? What are the consequences in terms of costs and loss? For each new system, IFV has conducted several field trials with each manufacturer in order to evaluate each point. We proceed to an exhaustive sorting of each part of the mechanical harvest: berries, wood, leaves, petioles etc. for as much as two rows of hundred meters each. We also keep everything that is ejected from the sorting system in order to assess the losses (ejected berries) and take a stock of the cleaning result. From 2001 to 2012 we have built a database on this subject, collecting figures from machines with or without cleaning systems, and with or without destemmers on board. More demonstrating than analyzing all the figures, year by year, machine by machine and variety by variety, a macro analysis of all the data shows the incredible evolution of the mechanical grape harvesting. For example, the rate of unwanted parts like leaves or small parts of wood has dropped of 88 % with the newest machines and all the last innovations compared to the most basic ones. Not only the leaves and petioles are best removed (-80%), but also stems: – 96 %. Mechanical grape harvesting is really optimized and can be used even for high quality production.