Hand-picked, hand-selected, and hand-crafted are all terms linked to quality in wine—indeed, the message is widespread that good wine is made in the vineyards. However, high-quality grapes don’t just grow themselves. This is a technically challenging crop that relies heavily on intervention by people actually working among the vines. Availability of workers to do these jobs is a topic of increasing concern across the wine world, including in Eastern Europe. Many wonder whether it’s realistic for wineries to continue to rely on hand labor and what, if anything, can be done to mitigate this challenge. Romania and Hungary are among the countries struggling to meet their labor needs. This essay will examine the scope of the problem and the actions wineries are taking to solve it.
Many vineyard and winery jobs are traditionally done by hand labor, particularly critical at harvest time, which typically requires a big workforce boost for several weeks. For instance, Șerban Dâmboviceanu at Corcova in southern Romania has a permanent team of around 30 people but hires a further 150 to harvest the estate’s 60 hectares—and that’s just for a small winery, in a country where some vineyards are over 2,500 hectares. Dâmboviceanu reports, “Every year, it’s harder to find workers in the vineyard.” Money spent on harvesting machinery is one potential solution, and increasingly common, though for a small winery this can be a huge financial commitment. A harvesting machine can potentially cost €100,000 to €200,000. However, machine harvesting is not always easy, or even possible, and one source estimated that over 50% of vineyards in Romania can’t actually be machine picked. Wineries need the right trellising in place (fragile old concrete posts, for example, don’t take well to being shaken by harvesting machines, and pergola or bush vines are not suitable either), and machine picking of small plots, steep slopes, or narrow terraces is simply not feasible. As Vivien Ujvári, winemaker at Barta in Tokaj, Hungary, explained, “Jobs that can’t be mechanized on our terraces are spraying, pruning, green work, harvesting, [and] under-vine soil tillage. It is basically because of the steepness (63 degrees) and stones.” Then, there are certain styles of wine where hand-harvesting is essential—for instance, in Tokaj, picking individual berries for Tokaji Aszú or selecting botrytis-affected bunches for Szamorodni. More broadly, this is also the case for wine styles where whole bunches are required, such as sparkling wine or those that go through carbonic maceration.
The problem is particularly dramatic in Romania, where Philip Cox, co-owner of Cramele Recaș, says, “There is just a plain shortage of people, as over 4 million Romanians of working age have left the country to work abroad, from a population here of about 18 million. Also, there has been, until recently, a trend for many people from rural areas to want to move to cities and work in industry rather than in agriculture, which is seen as poorly paid, difficult work.” Cox even recruited a team from Vietnam this year to make up for shortages of local workers. There are pros and cons to this, with a need for training given that viticulture is unfamiliar in Asia, but Cox says, “It is going well, and we will for sure expand this program in the future, as they are definitely more happy doing this work than Romanians—for them, it’s a good salary.”
Romania’s challenge is actually two-fold: both lack of workers and loss of the better workers abroad. Romanian agricultural workers are crucial in Western Europe, doing jobs the locals don’t want to do. It is also likely to be the more skilled Romanians who leave to work elsewhere. For example, Vine Care UK, which provides vineyard workers in the UK, has a website full of Romanians working as supervisors. This is understandable when the monthly minimum wage in Romania is equivalent to €467. It is not hard to double that working a succession of harvests in Western Europe. Dan Balaban, owner of Davino, believes the problems date back to the economic crisis in 2008, noting, “We can barely find people willing to do handwork in the vines or wineries, and the good workers are all abroad.” Rural areas, where vineyards tend to be located, find the problem particularly acute. The remaining rural workforce is aging and can struggle with the physicality of picking on steep slopes. Even during the Covid-19 lockdown, countries like the UK and Germany put special quarantine exemptions in place to allow Eastern European workers to travel. Dâmboviceanu added that wineries in Romania thought workers would come home. “Some returned in April and May,” he explains, “but they returned fast to countries in Western Europe.”
The Covid-19 situation has complicated the worker story in other ways, too. Dâmboviceanu used to employ workers from the villages south of Craiova but stopped because of risk of exposing the remote village of Corcova to the virus. The southern communities have family working in Italy, France, and Spain and travel frequently, so they are more likely to pick up infection. However, there’s only a small pool of local workers, so the winery has tried to mechanize as much as possible, spending €20,000 on weeding machines and trimmers, while using permanent workers for skilled jobs like pruning. Balaban likewise confirms that he’s invested €100,000 in the last two to three years for mechanization, in part to reduce labor needs but also to improve working conditions. He cites electrical pruners, which reduce discomfort and effort but also improve efficiency, pruning up to 1,000 vines per day. His other solution has simply been to increase wages to match more closely what can be earned abroad. One source estimated that vineyard workers were earning €15 a day in 2017, whereas now, better wineries are paying €35 to €40 a day. All of these extra costs can be a challenge for an industry where many wineries are barely profitable, if at all, and the possibility of increased prices is limited by competition.
For Philip Cox, another complication related to Covid-19 is that his leading winemakers are abroad and may not get permission to travel to Romania for the 2020 harvest. In Romania, there is limited availability of locally trained winemakers with the expertise required for modern winemaking. Cox would like to employ local winemakers but doesn’t feel that they get the right sort of scientific training to work at a 30 million-bottle winery like his. A lecturer at the University of Iași explained that attracting the right caliber of students is hard because the wine industry is not seen as an aspirational place to work. Dâmboviceanu says Corcova employs home-grown winemakers but sponsored their training. One solution proposed by Oliver Bauer of Crama Bauer is for Romanian wineries to be able to offer official apprenticeships leading to a diploma, to train people in the field for viticulture and winemaking. He adds, “Most won’t last half a year—they will run away when they see what a winemaker actually does!” But he’s sure the ones who stay would be better trained than local university graduates. The land ownership situation was quite different in Hungary, as families were able to own tiny plots of land and continue to grow crops, including grapes. Ujvári explained, “In the wine regions, almost every family has their own tiny vineyards, so sometimes it is not a question to be involved or not as a kid. My father used to joke [that] everybody was born as a viticulturist and later on some learned winemaking. Also, having a winery [or] bottling your own wine is a status symbol, so it is a fashionable thing, too.” Ujvári believes that the quality of education in Hungary is good, and increasingly, most young winemakers travel and hone their skills overseas. “We recognized we have to be open-minded and learn new things in viticulture and wine, and also on the business side.”
Hungary has also seen a significant loss of labor, with around 340,000 of its citizens working overseas, particularly in Germany, Austria, and the UK. In viticulture, it’s not simply about workers going abroad but also an aging workforce and a young generation opting out of agriculture. “The Hungarian workers who loved to work in the vineyards and who had experience and knowledge about the vines have started to age, and the young generation [doesn’t] really want to . . . work in agriculture,” explained György Lőrincz Jr. of St Andrea winery in Eger. A winery in Tokaj explained that the northeast counties of Hungary have seen most workers leave for Germany and the UK. This is a region of steep slopes, terraces, and wine styles that need hand-picking, with only 15% to 20% of vineyards even workable by machine—and then only to make dry wines. It seems that many of the newer wineries rely on temporary workers, giving them only a few months’ work each year, almost certainly at minimum wages that are not much higher than Romania’s at €487 per month.
One solution reported by István Szepsy Jr. is to give workers permanent contracts and guarantee a salary for a full year, along with a bonus to motivate productivity, but only a handful of wineries in the region are believed to do this. Ujvári adds, “We try to keep our workers for the long term. We can work with them on a good salary rate, as we are doing their work announcements to the government, not via a contractor. It is a little extra work for us, but it is worth it long term.” Another solution from one leading winery is to set up a shared vineyard rental scheme with the team of laborers. These workers and their families do all the hand labor, while the winery supports this by financing materials and mechanical tasks, and addressing the risks of hail, frost, and birds. Hungary has a tax-free allowance for “handcrafted” production, but as the winery points out, these partnerships are more about solving the labor issue and incentivizing workers to come back from Western Europe. A spokesperson says, “This looks to be the future. It is expensive but seems the only chance to have intelligent people in your vineyard who feel what you feel, who have sense and emotion.”
Andrea Sauska of Sauska Winery also sees a sense of pride as important, noting, “Fine vineyard work is carefully planned and executed by a team we know and trust. Pruning, bending, tying canes, especially grafting. These local people are part of our ‘one plot-one worker’ program, which means that they are familiar with the concept, they know what we do and why we do it. They work the same lot every year, they remember what the winemaker or consultant asked to change, they take notes, [and] they are responsible for their own little team. They are proud of their work and feel connected to the vineyards they work on.” She also explains that casual work (that is, uncontracted, temporary work) is still essential for the harvest and there is no way to avoid this. In the Eger region, Lőrincz Jr. reports the difficulty of maintaining a consistent team and the need for constant training. St Andrea usually works with around 25 casual laborers, but last year, 350 people jointly covered this work, with some just staying for a day. He notes, “We have tried to give them a job all year so that they can count on this, but no one has taken it up.” He adds, “At our quality level, we cannot mechanize everything, but what we can, we do, like trimming the shoots, defoliation, under-vine soil tillage, [and] trunk brushing.”
Vineyard labor is a frequent topic of conversation among winemakers in these two countries, as they lose potential workers to better paid agricultural jobs in Western Europe and as those left behind continue aging. There are strategies that can mitigate these issues to some extent, including mechanization, higher pay, improving working conditions, outsourcing labor, and making viticulture more aspirational through building a sense of pride and involvement for workers and their families. However, the industry, especially in Romania, needs to lobby government and universities for better and more relevant education, as well as new strategies like apprenticeships. It could learn from Hungary, which seems to be doing a better job, at least at the winemaker level. The challenge is that these solutions often come with financial implications in a barely profitable industry.
Undoubtedly, the labor problem has to be tackled: there are some jobs, vineyards, and styles of wine that will always need people if they are to survive. As Philip Cox sums up, “We will still need manual labor in the future—wherever we can get it from!”
“Coming to the UK for seasonal agricultural work on English farms.” Gov.uk. June 3, 2020. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coming-to-the-uk-for-seasonal-agricultural-work-on-english-farms.
“Hofstätter: a private jet to bring seasonal workers to Italy from Romania.” Wine News. May 19, 2020. https://winenews.it/en/hofstatter-a-private-jet-to-bring-seasonal-workers-to-italy-from-romania_417230.
“Hungary rises the national minimum wage.” Countryeconomy.com. Accessed July 27, 2020. https://countryeconomy.com/national-minimum-wage/hungary.
“Quality and native grapes of Romania.” Institute of Masters of Wine. June 23, 2020. https://www.mastersofwine.org/events/webinar-series.
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Sarnyai, Gábor. “Germany Becomes the Most Popular Destination for Hungarians Working Abroad.” Hungary Today. July 17, 2018. https://hungarytoday.hu/germany-becomes-the-most-popular-destination-for-hungarians-working-abroad.
Vine Care UK. Accessed July 24, 2020. http://www.vinecareuk.com/meet-the-team.
probably because they can pick a succession of other crops as well as grapes, whereas not so many opportunities in Romania to do this
While the "the locals don’t want to do" it argument is true for the US and UK, it's not as applicable to Spain where we have massive amounts of Romanians working in wine.
The problem here is that the mid-20th century saw an industrialization of Spain with people moving to the cities. That was followed by the EU's quite poor manner to reduce excess vineyard land with sloppily-applied vine-pull schemes. These two events combined have let to a massive depopulation of wine regions which, with the exception of Penedès next to Barcelona, aren't anywhere near population centers.
There still are plenty of Spaniards who go out and work the harvest but there simply aren't enough people in total and so outside workers are needed. As to why Romanians come here, I don't know as they'll only earn about 850€ a month and when taking into account the higher cost of living, it doesn't seem like it's all that advantageous.
I am really glad thatCaroline Gilby wrote on labor - an incredibly important topic that deserves so much more attention in our industry. Without it, we have no industry. Some of you might be following the conversations around labor happening this week.Though this essay does not get into ethics, it does explore another critical and challenging aspect of labor that is being felt globally. For anyone pursuing the MW or for those who just want to piece together the larger context around labor issues, it's important to consider labor through a variety of lenses.