As any sommelier will tell you, a good glass of wine is no small feat. A great deal goes into achieving that perfect blend of body, sweetness, tannin, acidity and fruit and it all starts with sourcing the right grapes in the right way. The latest episode of CNH Industrial’s Behind the Wheel web series follows a day at the vineyard of Patrice Vocoret, a French wine producer in Chablis, Burgundy’s northernmost wine district. Vocoret uses Braud grape harvesters from CNH Industrial’s New Holland Agriculture brand to pick grapes to make Chablis Grand Cru, Chablis Premier Cru, Chablis and Petit Chablis wine across his sprawling vineyard.
Grape harvesters are used for a number of important operations on vineyards including: the preparation of vines, pruning, spraying and harvesting. The machines can also be used with other crops including the likes of olives and blackcurrants. With more than 40 years of experience in mechanical grape harvesting technology, New Holland Agriculture is the world leader in self-propelled grape harvesters. Today, the brand exports to over 30 global markets.
“Chablis is composed of 6,000 acres of vineyards of which 80% are picked mechanically. The Braud VN2080 (depicted in the episode) and the recently launched Braud 9080N are machines dedicated to narrow vineyards, so the tractor base unit has an extendable, variable frame, which allows the operator to adapt the frame of the tractor to the width of the vineyard’s row spacing,” explains Philippe Boisseau, Marketing Specialist for Olive and Grape Harvesters with New Holland Agriculture, in the episode. “A shaking system, designed to be as gentle as human hands, collects the grapes off of the grapevine canopy, feeding them into a set of baskets within the machine, which sort the grapes into two different hoppers – higher quality grapes into one and lower quality into the other to improve the quality of the wine produced.”
A lovely setting, a sought after gastronomic product, and an important contribution to the environment: the ECOBraud system present in both New Holland’s grape harvester and tractor product portfolio is able to reduce a vineyard’s carbon footprint by 40%. That translates into a 10% overall CO2 reduction per bottle of wine. The system is able to achieve these savings thanks to its implementation of various factors, including precision farming technologies, efficient engines from sister brand FPT Industrial and an Intelligent Management System which maximizes fuel savings by switching off the machine’s shaking functionality when it reaches the end of a grapevine canopy row.
New Holland Agriculture’s grape harvesting product range is made exclusively in Coex, France, a Center of Excellence for grape harvesting which houses dedicated design, manufacturing and testing departments.
