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FEATURE The industry’s worker shortage of Vintage 2022
Human Resources
Pickers can be choosers
The industry’s worker shortage of Vintage 2022
The COVID pandemic produced numerous challenges for wine producers in Australia: from dismal visitation to sales that stayed at the bottom of the barrel. Another complication was the closure of borders and lack of seasonal workers. Harrison Davies spoke with producers to see how they dealt with a vintage worker shortage in 2022.
Calls for help rung from coast to coast as Vintage 2022 got underway across Australia. Producers the country over scrambled to find workers to help pick fruit and process grapes. “Hi there winos. Is anyone still looking for a last minute vintage position? We still need a few cellar hands,” said one producer in the Pyrenees. “We are looking for V2022 workers in Clare Valley, South Australia. We will need two people. Start around last week of January till end of April,” said another in the Clare Valley. Similar concerns echoed across vineyards and in cellars as wine businesses struggled to keep up with a fruitful vintage and a lack of seasonal staff. Most years the vintage is covered by working holiday makers, seasonal workers who only expect a few months of work before moving on. This year, however, vintage landed in the last few weeks of “fortress Australia”, when the borders were closed, preventing anyone from coming or leaving. Producers were quickly finding themselves short staffed and struggling to keep up with the busy pace of vintage. The previous federal government put though several policies to try and alleviate some of the challenges. Then Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, Alex Hawke, released a statement saying that working holiday rules would become more lenient to make up for the worker shortfalls. “Until the end of 2022, there will be no limit on the length of time working holiday makers can work for the same employer,” he said in a statement. “The above measures are temporary and designed to provide immediate assistance to Australian businesses that are currently facing critical workforce shortages, to enable them to continue delivering goods and services to the community.” These changes seemed to be too little, too late and producers began to look for other ways to get grapes off vines and into the cellar.
Some brought all hands on deck for all parts of the vintage, bringing cellar hands into the vineyards to pick fruit and bringing vineyard hands and viticulturists into the cellar to provide assistance. Some called upon friends and family to help pick grapes and offered them food and drinks in exchange for their work. Others were simply fed up at the quality of work provided by locals, as one New South Wales producer lamented. “Anyone else had a gutful of pickers this vintage?” he said in a Facebook post.
“Tax free cash in hand, no care, no responsibility, a whinge a minute. What happened to the Australian work ethic?”
Many hands make light work
Finding vintage workers has proven a significant challenge over the 2022 vintage for both large and small producers alike. Vas Sekerin is a winemaker in the Adelaide Hills region and his boutique label, State of Nature Wines, navigated similar challenges to all throughout the industry. The Adelaide Hills usually find their grape pickers from contractors who bring their workers to small vineyards throughout the harvesting season. The Hills are somewhat unique to other regions in South Australia as many of the grape pickers come from Adelaide and vineyards don’t rely so heavily on international work.
Because of the shortage of international workers, however, contracting groups were spread thin across neighbouring regions, creating head scratching challenges for Sekerin at State of Nature.
“[The Adelaide Hills] is serviced mostly by residents of Adelaide and they have little groups of people who are organised usually by a foreman,” Sekerin said. “It’s very hard to organise, picking, because that’s usually either international workers, or friends and family. “This year because there’s a very limited supply of workers, we had to lock in picking days a lot earlier than we would like to, just because we need to guarantee that we’re going to have pickers. “That adds a little bit of a complexity to the vintage because ideally, you want to be able to make a picking call a lot closer to when you want to pick grapes. “Because of the scarcity of work, I had to pick one of the vineyards at a sub optimal time, because I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to get someone together at all.” Oliver’s Taranga in McLaren Vale faced similar problems when looking for pickers and found different solutions, as they had a larger staff on hand to help get grapes off vines. They faced trouble finding workers, especially for hand picking, and were lucky enough to have a cooler vintage. Oliver’s Taranga winemaker and director Corrina Wright said they were thankful for cooler temperatures over summer.
“It was a long slow ripening period for McLaren Vale, so those vintages always work smoothly as there isn’t any rush for picking that happens in heat wave years,” she said. “This was probably lucky that it was a cooler ripening period given the lack of handpicking labour access. “Our vineyard crew was similar to usual as we were able to spread out the machine picking and didn’t need to do so much night work to avoid the heat of the day given the cooler conditions.” The lack of staff also bred conditions that made picking rate rapidly rise and create competition amongst producers to get workers.
Hard earned dollars
The cost of wages for pickers was much higher for many producers due to the fact that residents demand higher rates as well as the demand for work being exponentially higher than in other seasons.
Sekerin said a common issue that was blown out this year was the trust between picking crews and producers. “Some pickers don’t like to work with new clients as they might not be able to guarantee payment - our picking crew has been burned in the past with a producer who didn’t pay their bills on time, and they were put out quite significantly,” he explained. “It’s all about trust and building the relationship with your picking crew. “The prices have gone up again this year and people are asking more and more year to year for harvesting, which is on the one hand good because people are getting fair wages for their work, which is hard work.
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