The annual grape harvest is arguably the single most important event in our year. After all, without grapes, our wine couldn't exist! But it’s not just about getting the grapes off the vine and stomping them—every step we take in the process contributes to the ultimate taste of our wine. And of course, at Imaginedouro, we care about making the best wine possible. That’s why we’re committed to combining traditional methods of winemaking that have stood the test of centuries with modern technology that eases the process and guarantees a delicious result. But what does that mean in practice? As we approach our 2025 harvest, let’s look back on our 2024 harvest as an example.

Our winemaker, Gabriela Canossa, checks in on our grapes.

Our 2024 Harvest started well before the actual day. Since we only harvest our grapes once they’ve reached the perfect level of internal sugars for fermentation, our winemaker made habitual visits to our vineyards in the sweltering heat of August and Early September. She inspected the grapes visually and used a refractometer to find the exact level of sugar. Once the grapes were ready, we came in immediately to pick them.

Our team—made up of our company owners, their family, and seasoned workers—arrived at our vineyards at dawn, so that the majority of picking could get done while it was still cool.

We spent the day picking our grapes by hand, bunch by bunch. While this traditional method lets us have total control over what gets brought to our winery to be processed, it does mean we spent a lot of our time carrying heavy buckets of grapes to our truck to be transported to our winery!

Once our grapes arrived at our winery, they were put through our destemmer. The destemmer, as you may have guessed, separated the grapes from their stems. The grapes were then run through an auger that mashed them up. This step ensures we only get the flavor of the grapes, not their stems, which can make the wine bitter. We constantly kept watch of the machine, raking away the stems and patting them down into a separate container, and raking and patting, and raking and patting, until all our grapes had been destemmed.

From the destemmer our mashed-up grapes were pumped into a water-cooled stainless steel tank, which our winemaker kept cold to prevent early fermentation.

Our grapes in the chilled tank before being stomped.

After a group dinner and some sleep, we got up bright and early to stomp our grapes. Yes, exactly how you’re imagining it! This traditional method has lasted so long for a reason—it allows us to gently crush our grapes into juice, introduce natural yeasts, and keep the bitter seeds of the grapes from making their way into our wine.

So we got to stomping (under the watchful eye of our winemaker), and after about an hour and a half of work, all the grapes were crushed and their seeds and remaining stems had risen to the top.

From there, the crushed grapes went through one final process. We pumped the juice out through a hole in the bottom, so that the must—which contained the grape skins, seeds, and remaining stems—stayed on top. This grape juice was transported into two 3,000 liter tanks, where it started to ferment and become our 2024 vintage.

So there’s your peek into our harvest process. While every vineyard harvests and processes their grapes in their own way, we think ours makes some pretty good wine!

How do we harvest our grapes?