One of the things I learnt while in Germany is that there's a vast difference between hand-crafted wines and the ones that are mass-produced for the supermarket shelves. For example, only 5% of the world's vineyards are harvested by hand. For Van Volxem wines (the winery I was shooting for last month) each vineyard is picked three times: once to remove any bad grapes; on a second occasion, to harvest the first crop of grapes for their cheaper vintages; and on a final occasion to pick the remaining grapes for their more select wines. This photograph was taken to reference the hand-crafted nature of their wines, so it's a bit out of context when posted as a blog entry, but I decided that it was probably worth posting here too.