There are no hands to pick the grapes. That is the prayer that is already beginning to be heard in the harvests that are taking place throughout Spain or those that are about to begin, where the increasingly high tension faced by the wineries in the sector is spurred by a heat wave that forces them to advance the campaign, overlapping the harvesting of other types of fruits, with the high season of the hospitality industry and with the departure of many young people at the end of the summer.
This imbalance not only threatens to reduce the volume of production, but also jeopardizes the quality of the grapes by preventing them from being harvested at optimal ripeness.
One of them is Antonio Gondar, the owner of the Avó Roxo winery in Pontevedra, who is forced to double the days of harvesting in the field by having only eight of the ten seasonal workers necessary for his four and a half hectare campaign, and points out that, "although the harvest is early, the problem is that there is no longer a workforce."
The winegrower, who traditionally relied on family help and young students, observes how the advance of school calendars reduces his support network, forcing him to extend his work days from four to eight days to prevent the grapes from being overused on the vine and assuming a risk that, if the weather changes, "translates into losses of at most 15 or 20% of the total production" of his vineyards.
Likewise, Marco Antonio Santamaría, partner of the Condes de Albarei cooperative in the Galician region of Rías Baixas, explains that "for the harvest, traditionally a lot of young people before starting their studies and hospitality workers were used", two groups that today are inaccessible because, with the advance of about three weeks in the harvests, "both seasons overlap" in an insurmountable way.
Santamaría emphasizes the impossibility of competing in these new conditions by warning that "workers are not going to abandon the hospitality industry for the 8 or 10 days that the harvest lasts." A scenario that, according to him, is aggravated by an indisputable "demographic factor, with less youth, and the fact that university now starts earlier than a few years ago", which deals a blow to youth recruitment.
Outside of Galicia and looking at the entire wine-growing field, in the 2025 campaign alone, this phenomenon affected 63% of the country's wineries as they recorded difficulties in completing their workforce, according to a study by Synergie. In this context, its Director of Operations, Inés Lavadió, explains that "when the winemakers rule that the grapes can be picked, the winery needs a lot of staff and very quickly," forcing an accelerated search for those better known as crews.
Therefore, maintaining the templates as a continuity of the temporary workers is key; That is the case of Carlos Fernández de Piérola, director of Bodegas Fernández de Piérola, who has a constant crew of between 15 and 20 workers, which contrasts with the tension in Villabuena de Álava, where its mayor and winegrower, Iñaki Pérez, details that "with climate change it has gotten ahead of us", causing a mismatch that forces them to compete for labor with other fruit campaigns. Pérez manages a vineyard of about 35 hectares in which he requires eight day laborers, explaining that "at the same time all the harvests need people and we all compete at the same time, consequently we do not have labor."
Given the shortage, farmers are forced to share crews on down days so that the harvest is not paralyzed, assuming delays that, according to Fernández de Piérola, compromise the quality of the fruit because the grapes "would be picked later and that could affect the quality" of the harvest.
