The Raisin Industry / A practical treatise on the raisin grapes, their history, culture and curing

by Gustavus A. Eisen

—The packing-house should be large and airy and, whether it is made of lumber, brick or adobe, it should in preference to anything else be large. Room is needed at every operation in the packing-house, and it is hardly possible to get too much of it. So far no very large and perfect buildings for packing-houses have ever been erected in California; the raisin industry is too young for that, and even the best of our buildings are only temporary ones. It is here not possible nor desirable to give any instructions how to build and arrange a raisin packing-house, as every packer will have his own ideas and his own necessities in this respect, and not two packers would build alike. All we can do here is to refer to what is needed in a general way, in order that the reader will get some preliminary ideas of what he will require when his raisin vineyard comes in bearing.

The packing-house should contain the following apartments: First, the general packing-room, in which the raisins are assorted and packed. Then the sweating-house or equalizing room, in which the boxes are stored for several weeks in order to equalize the moisture in the raisins. Then the stemming-room, in which the stemming and grading of the loose raisins is carried on. Then we have the weighing room, where the raisins are received from the field, and where they are weighed when this is required. There should also be an office and a pasting room, where the labels are pasted on the lining paper, and finally there should be plenty of veranda or shed room all around the building, where boxes of all kinds can be received and temporarily stored, either before the raisins are packed, or afterwards when they are ready to be shipped. We might also wish to have a room for a box factory, where boxes of all kinds are nailed up. This can in our climate best be done in the shed or under the veranda. The packing-house proper should be as large as all the other rooms together. It can hardly be made too large, as during the lively packing season hundreds of hands will here be busy, each one with his special work. The floor of the packing-house should be of matched lumber, and slanting towards the center, along which should run a small gutter. Any other material, such as cement, may also be used, the only object in view being that the floor can be washed from time to time and the dirt carried off through the gutter as readily as possible. The packing-room should have places for long narrow tables, at which the packing and assorting is done, and these tables can most conveniently be run the whole length of the room. At one end there should be room for the presses and the nailing tables, as well as storage room for empty and full boxes.

The Sweating-house.

—The sweating-house or sweating-room should immediately adjoin the packing-room. It should be built either of matched lumber or of brick or adobe, in order that the temperature may be kept tolerably even and the moisture confined if necessary. The sweating-room in the Fresno Raisin and Fruit Packing Co’s house in Fresno is large enough to contain 40 tons of raisins at one time, and is about 50 feet square, while the sweating-room on the Forsyth vineyard measures about 35 feet by 50 feet, and is built of brick in two stories, the lower one of which is used for raisins, the upper one for storage. For those who wish figures, we might state as examples of buildings, that the Forsyth packing-house, which also contains a sweating-room but not a stemming-room, is 120 feet by 35 feet, and contains besides a small platform outside for the reception of boxes, etc. The Fresno Raisin and Fruit Packing Co’s building is about 150 feet by 75 feet.

Raisin Stemmer and Grader.

The Stemmer and Grader.

—This large machine is a California invention. The principle on which it works is that the dry stems are separated by revolving the raisins rapidly in a drum made of perforated galvanized iron or of strong galvanized wire. After the stems are separated, the raisins fall together on screens of wire with various size meshes, through which the smaller berries are separated from the larger berries, while the refuse and broken stems are blown away by a fan. The most perfect stemmer and grader is the one on the Butler vineyard. The raisins are first dumped into a hopper below the floor, and from there they are run automatically on a belt to the top of the stemmer, where they enter the drum. From the drum they fall on the separating screens, which grade them in three grades, each one falling in a box of its own. Somewhat similar stemmers are seen in all the large vineyards, all run by steam and large enough to stem and grade from forty to sixty tons of raisins a day. There is considerable difference as to the ingenuity with which these stemmers are built, some requiring many more hands to run them than others. The Butler stemmer requires, part of the time, only one man for its successful running. The Forsyth stemmer stands under a shed in the open air, apart from the packing-house, in order that the dust may be freely carried away. The smaller vineyards have stemmers run by hand, and have separate graders also run by hand, large enough to stem and grade from five to eight tons of raisins per day.

Raisin Lever Press.