Sunrise, Sticky Fingers, and Three Generations: What Harvest Day Really Looks Like at Sunnybrook

The alarm goes off at 4:45 a.m., and honestly, nobody needs it. During harvest, the whole family wakes up before the rooster does — partly out of excitement, partly because Grandma Ruth has already started the coffee and the smell travels straight through the farmhouse walls.

If you've ever sipped a glass of our Maréchal Foch on a Saturday afternoon and wondered where it came from, pull up a chair. We're going to walk you through one full day at Sunnybrook Farm Winery during harvest — the most beautiful, exhausting, sticky-fingered week of our entire year.

5:30 a.m.: Coffee, Headlamps, and Cold Toes

Harvest starts in the dark, and there's a reason for that. Picking grapes in the cool early-morning hours keeps the fruit fresh and the sugars stable before the sun can warm things up. So by first light, you'll find us in the vineyard rows with headlamps bobbing, shears clicking, and lugs (those black harvesting crates) filling up fast.

"This is my favorite hour of the whole year," says my dad, Jim, who planted our first vines back in 2008. "The fog's sitting low between the rows, everybody's half-awake, and then the sun comes up over the east ridge and — well, there's nothing like it."

My daughter Ellie, the fourth generation to put her hands in this soil, has a slightly different take: "My favorite part is finding the biggest grape cluster and daring Grandpa to eat it whole."

For the record, he always does.

9:00 a.m.: The Hand-Sorting Line

By mid-morning, the first trailer load of grapes rolls up to the crush pad, and the real work begins. Every cluster gets a set of human eyes — and usually a set of human hands — before it goes anywhere near a tank.

We run everything across a sorting table, pulling out leaves, underripe berries, the occasional very confused grasshopper. It's slow, it's meticulous, and it's the kind of thing big commercial operations simply can't do at this scale. That's the trade-off of being a small family farm winery: we can be picky because we want to be.

"People ask why our wines taste the way they do," my mom, Carol, told a tour group last fall, "and the answer is boring and beautiful at the same time. We touch every grape. Twice."

Noon: Lunch Under the Sycamore

Harvest lunch is sacred around here, and it's always potluck-by-default. Somebody brings sandwiches, somebody's neighbor shows up with a crockpot of chili, and Grandma Ruth inevitably produces a pie from ingredients nobody can account for. We eat under the big sycamore by the tasting room, boots off, hands washed (mostly), and a bottle of last year's vintage cracked open for comparison purposes.

Strictly professional, of course.

It's also when the phones start ringing — folks calling to book weekend tastings, couples asking about hosting their engagement party in the barn. Harvest season is busy in every direction, and we wouldn't trade it.

2:00 p.m.: Pressing, Pumping, and Punch-Downs

The afternoon belongs to the cellar. Grapes that fermented earlier in the week get pressed, juice gets moved, tanks get checked, and the punch-downs begin — that's the process of pushing the grape skins back down into the fermenting juice a few times a day. It's aromatic work, to put it politely. The cellar smells like a bakery crossed with a berry patch, and yes, your clothes will carry that smell home like a souvenir.

Ellie has claimed the hydrometer as her job, testing sugar levels with the seriousness of a lab tech twice her age. "When it hits the number Dad says, I get to ring the bell," she explains. There is, in fact, a bell. It is rung often.

5:30 p.m.: The Golden Hour

By late afternoon, the second picking crew heads out for varieties that come in later in the season, and the light turns that impossible golden color that no photograph has ever done justice to. This is when visitors who booked our Harvest Experience tours get the best of both worlds — they'll walk the rows, taste grapes straight off the vine, and end up on the patio with a glass of something chilled while the crush pad hums away in the background.

If you're thinking about visiting during harvest (typically mid-September through October here in our neck of the woods), here are a few tips from the folks wearing the sticky gloves:

• Book ahead. Weekends fill up fast once the leaves start turning.
• Wear real shoes. Vineyard rows and crush pads are charming, not paved.
• Ask questions. We love them. All of them. Especially the weird ones.
• Come hungry. Our food-truck lineup on harvest weekends is not a suggestion, it's a highlight.

9:00 p.m.: One Last Walk Through the Rows

By the time the equipment is hosed down and the last tank is topped up, it's dark again. Someone — usually Dad — takes one last walk down the vineyard rows with a flashlight, just checking. Nothing wrong, just checking.

"Your grandfather did the same thing," he told me last week. "Every night of every harvest. Said the vines could tell if you cared."

Whether or not grapevines can sense devotion, I can't say for certain. But I do know this: when you pour a glass of Sunnybrook wine at your table, you're tasting a 4:45 a.m. alarm, a lunch under the sycamore, a kid ringing a bell in the cellar, and three generations of stubborn, joyful work.

Come see it happen. The rows are waiting, the coffee's already on, and Grandma Ruth always makes enough pie to share.