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The date varies depending on the ripeness of the grapes across the different regions making up the Champagne winegrowing area. A network for monitoring grape ripeness was set up back in to define the harvest date and conditions as precisely as possible.
By picking the grapes at peak ripeness, the quality of the wines is enhanced. At harvest time, nearly , seasonal workers, in teams of about four per hectare, get involved in manually picking the clusters of grapes over the 34, hectares of the appellation. The planting density in Champagne is around 8, vine plants per hectare. The aim of such a density is to optimise fruit quality. The more numerous the plants, the more they compete for nutrients and therefore the lower the crop load per plant.
If the vine plant has a small crop load, all of its reserves will be devoted to this load and to its quality. A vine plant can live for a very long time - up to 50 years or more. Beyond that, its yield will begin to diminish. Growers spend the bulk of their time working in the vineyard. Most of their tasks are done by hand and add up to several hundred hours of work per hectare. The first task is winter pruning: this is absolutely essential as the quality of the harvest will depend on it.
Harvesting begins about 90 days after full flowering, so typically in September. This date is heavily dependent on the weather however, and may need to change accordingly.
