The lights were so bright they dimmed the full moon. The crew waited restively for the call to action. The cast was assembled. The cameras were ready to roll. The occasion?

It was harvest for Ryan’s Vineyard.

This is the 14-acre vineyard on Big Ranch Road planted to sauvignon blanc grapes that are destined for Honig and Duckhorn wineries.

Since March, Register photographer Jorgen Gulliksen and I have been visiting this vineyard and following the progress of the vines and the work of the crew, all in an attempt to answer the question: Why do some grapegrowers call themselves winegrowers?

The team looking after this vineyard consisted of owner Jim Verhey and Garrett Buckland, Robert Jordan and Juvenal Magdaleno from Buckland Vineyard Management.

They were all on hand for this first night of harvesting the grapes for Honig, along with Honig winemaker Kristin Belair. It was the e-mail from Belair that had got things rolling Tuesday night. For the last few weeks she’d been out in the vineyard checking the Brix (sugar) levels; on Friday morning she reported on the sugars and added, “Per Robert’s and my conversation, we will be starting with about 30 tons from blocks 2 and 3 on Tuesday night for delivery Wednesday morning.”

And so there we all were Tuesday night.

Why a night harvest?

“With the whites, to preserve flavor you want them to come in cool,” Belair explained.

Not an issue for red grapes, the whites apparently gain — or retain — a freshness if they’re harvested at night and delivered early in the morning to the winery.

“Kristen is willing to pay extra costs for the quality,” Buckland said, noting that there’s the cost of renting the lights to illuminate the field and the fact that the workers are “a little slower, a little more cautious” at night.

They warn their neighbors, Verhey said, and hope that they’ll be understanding for a couple of nights of the lights and the occasional croaking of back-up alarms from forklifts.

The three crews Magdaleno had assembled were hardly slow — at the starting signal, around 10 o’clock, they were off and down the rows, deftly wielding their knives like rapiers and filling the bins with lightning speed. Balancing the heavy bins on their heads, the men ran to the gondolas, pitched in the grapes and hurried back for more. Their goal was to harvest 40 tons that night.

They were being paid by the ton, Verhey said. With work scheduled to go from 10 at night to 6 in the morning, the workers stood to make anywhere from $18 to $25 an hour.  

There’s a competition to see who goes the fastest, Magadalena said, and aided by the clean rows of vineyard, “they’ll fly tonight.”

Maybe it was the lights, or maybe it was the freshness in the cooling night air, but there seemed to be an electric excitment in the air as the workers bounded from vine to vine. Grapes were flying too, as bins filled with grapes were hurtled over the vines and into the gondolas that were pulled by tractors down the rows, followed by the lights. 

Riding with the gondolas were Maria Lango and Rufena Soriano, whose job was to rapidly sort through the grapes to toss out MOG — matter other than grapes. While Magdaleno darted about with his flashlight to check on his crews, Jordan used a larger light to look for clusters that might have been dropped. Verhey took a turn riding with the gondolas, plucking leaves and sticks out of the grapes.

 “I love this time,” he said. “All our work for six months has led up to this night.”

Buckland agreed, “This is the best part of the year, the day we look forward to.”

From time to time the pair would examine a cluster of grapes, gold and now soft with juice. “This is a perfect cluster,” Verhey said holding one out. “The question is: What can we do to get great clusters every time across 15,000 vines?”

“We’re pretty happy,” Buckland said of the quality that the results of months of work to carry out the plans evolved with Belair. 

“We’ve done all we can to give Kristin the best possible fruit,” Verhey said.

“It’s the hand we’re dealt,” added Belair, who also expressed her optimism about this year’s harvest being exceptional. With the grapes now headed for the next step on their way to a wine bottle, she added that ahead for her are “are all kinds of choices. The question is, ‘How can I get the most out of these grapes?’”

Once her grapes are delivered, the next time Belair will meet with her winegrowers is when they sit down to taste results of all their respective efforts.

But around midnight after wandering through the vines for two hours and sampling the scattered grapes that had been left behind by the workers, I headed to my car.

“Think about us,” said Robert Jordan, who’d been working in vineyards since 3 a.m. that morning and would stay through till the work was done. And I did. I got home, showered off the dust and sticky juice from all my grape tastings, fell into bed and slept soundly till 6 a.m. And as I got up, I realized the workers out at Ryan’s Vineyard were just finishing their shift.