Night-time grape harvest is Alentejo estate's answer to extreme heat

Published on 24/09/2026 - 8:16 GMT+2

In the pitch-dark night, the grapes are lit up by the beams from helmets and tractors moving across the fields. At Herdade das Servas, an estate in Portugal’s Alentejo region, the grape harvest now takes place at night. And those who work here do not seem to mind.

Maria Jerónima Mendes is one of dozens of people involved in picking the grapes. She told AFP that the change has not disrupted the work and that, thanks to the light she carries with her, she even "sees the grapes better than in daylight".

"It sounds like a lie, but it isn’t. The body gets used to turning day into night and night into day," she explained.

On this estate, picking grapes at night began in 2024 as a test and has been adopted as standard practice since last year. It is a response to intense heat and increasingly frequent extreme weather events.

"This night-time harvest came from the need to provide better working conditions for the teams, because Alentejo has a very harsh climate in summer," Renato Neves told AFP. For this winegrower and oenologist, harvesting at night is no longer just an option: it is becoming an unavoidable reality for producers in the region.

"In future, it will be inevitable. In my view, more and more companies will start picking at night, because it is going to become very hard for people to carry on harvesting from 11 am or midday, in temperatures of 40, 41 or 42 degrees," he said.

Alentejo is one of the hottest and driest regions in mainland Portugal, where summer highs of between 35 and 38 degrees are common and peaks are even higher during heatwaves, episodes that specialists increasingly link to climate change.