Australia

How many grapes would a grape picker pick

Employment! At last. I am now a fully qualified grape picker. Which basically requires you to be poor enough and willing enough to take the astonishingly low rate of pay, and the long hours in the sun.

On the plus side I get out into the countryside, I get to breath the fresh air(only moderately laden with the chemicals they have probably sprayed on the grapes the night before) and take part in good honest toil on the land(and toil is right).

Its not that bad really, I'm just essentially lazy, and you have to work quite hard to make money grape picking. You get paid per bucket you fill, the faster you work the more you get paid. They even employ people to take the buckets to big bins on the back of tractors so that all you spend your time doing is picking grapes. You work in a gang of around 30-40 and you pick blocks of grapes. So far we have been working on Pinot Noir, which is one of the earlier varieties.

That all sounds quite civilised, except that the temperature gets up into the 30's in the middle of the day, and it is almost always sunny. You also have to take care not to slice of a finger with the snips you buy to cut the grapes. Its alright if you do though, you just shout medic and they give you a sticking plaster which lasts about 2 minutes until the grape juice your hands are covered in soaks through it.

You may be wondering why they havent invented a machine to do this job, well, they have, but thankfully(?) the grape vines seem to be sufficiently tangled up that it makes human pickers still preferrable.

Now, you may be wondering how much money I get for this easy work, walking along, plucking grapes from the vine, well, I get somewhere in the region of $1.25-2.00 per 10kg bucket. On my first day I managed 55 buckets, which after tax got me about $70. Depressingly its been downhill since then, but its only the start of the season, so the amount of grapes we've been picking is a bit small. In the next few weeks it should pick up though, then I'll have all the grapes I could ever want.

The good thing about grape picking is that it pays at all, since my attempts to get anything different have been stunningly unsuccessful. The people are pretty good too, a fair number of travellers, both foreign and Aussie, along with some regulars who seem to be able to pick about 50% more than I can. That being said, in my first week I think I have managed to pick almost 2 metric tons of grapes. Perhaps I will have picked the weight of a blue whale or a challenger tank by the time I'm finished.

In more exciting news, the Adelaide Festival starts soon, so I can finally get round to seeing some of the acts that have been playing in Edinburgh for the last 5 years. And all I needed to do was come round to the other side of the world to do it!

Hmmm, I'm sounding a bit negative I think. I'm actually quite content, the weather is nice, if a bit hot, the work is dull and monotonous but after a while I think I'll get used to it, and the people seem pretty good which is always the main battle in any job.

Posted by Craig at February 17, 2004 03:52 AM