By Mikayla van Loon
Mount Lilydale Mercy College students were busy working away harvesting its crop of grapes ready to press down into wine this week.
Agriculture students from Years 10, 11 and 12 spent the morning on Friday 1 April picking grapes off the vines to put into a crusher and destemmer.
Farm manager and agriculture and horticulture teacher Tim Thompson said this was one of the most exciting stages of the wine making process for the students having started in winter last year.
“We prune really carefully so we maintain a consistent vintage every year and that’s one of the things the kids do in winter,” he said.
“Then in January, February we put on the nets and seal them down and then the kids start doing ripeness analysis of the fruit and pluck off the leaves around the bunches to make sure that they’ve got good access to sunlight to mature well, and then they pick.”
The harvested grapes will stay in the pot for a week, where they will be pushed down twice a day everyday before the next fun and dirty pressing day.
“It will be put into this tank to settle for a couple of weeks so that all the leaves and the dead skins fall out, then next term the kids will syphon or rack the juice off into a barrel and then it’ll stay in a barrel for 12 months before the kids bottle it as well,” Mr Thompson said.
While Mr Thompson said this part of the agriculture course is about teaching students the wine making process, there are a number of other skills required and taught in
“From this process, it ties into VCE chemistry, it ties into VCE maths and it ties into VCE biology but much more importantly, it ties into real world knowledge of skills that can make kids very employable.”
The success of the agriculture program at MLMC has seen past students go onto a varied field of work including professional winemakers, doctors in soil science, cattle stud owners and even bull riders.
“That’s an absolute thrill to think that a little tiny program in a school like this can achieve such great results for students.
“It’s really important that schools actually see where the need is in the community and actually see where the interest is in their students in delivering learning.”
Mr Thompson said the cohort of students who take part in agriculture studies at all year levels is about 50/50 in terms of students who come from agriculture backgrounds and those who have grown up in a suburban environment.
“The school is a conduit [in this peri-urban area], so our kids end up everywhere but the cool thing is we get students every year who are the first in their family to go to university and they go on to do agriculture. Why? Because it was relevant to them.”
Although Mr Thompson said winemaking is probably one of the more “glamorous” programs at the school, students have the ability to learn a wide variety of skills like shearing sheep, pruning in the orchard and vineyard, wire lifting and grafting roses in the nursery.
“So it’s not just for the academics, it’s for all kids.”
