The bottles glowed like lava lamps between the vines. Wine from France — French table wine, made from the same grapes we had picked that morning. Two dozen of us sat around a folding table at the foot of a vineyard in Alsace, where dirt-encrusted hands passed around pieces of fresh bread and we chatted in French and English.

You want more, My love? asked Jeanne, offering to refill my glass from one of the label-less bottles of Si Rose – $17 by New York standards. I had bought the same wine, a blend of Gewürztraminer and Pinot Gris, exactly three days earlier at a wine bar in Brooklyn, where it cost $85. Here, during our lunch break, we drained half a dozen bottles that we took straight from the cellar.

I’d love to tell you that it tasted better because it was free, but let’s be honest: what wine wouldn’t taste better in a sunlit vineyard? In fact, I enjoyed it more because I could afford to be less fussy – I could sip it without worrying about the price.

While most people around me were paid, some of us were benevolentor volunteers – we had signed WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) contracts, committing to helping with the grape harvest for three weeks in exchange for food and accommodation with natural winemaking pioneer Christian Binner. Rather than spending thousands of dollars on another certification course, this was a practical chance to deepen my wine knowledge – and spend nearly a month abroad – without bankrupting myself.

The grape harvest is by turns enjoyable, exhausting, romantic and humiliating. You wake up with the sun, get a coffee and your Garden shears (scissors), pile into cars and go into the vines in pairs, cut grapes and throw them into buckets. They sweat, tell secrets, sing Serge Gainsbourg to pass the time. In the afternoons they lower themselves into a vat of fermenting grapes and crush them with their bare feet. In the evenings they take turns cooking for each other, making pasta and Pissaladie while practicing your French. Work, drink, sleep, repeat. It’s far from a vacation – more like a labor-intensive summer camp, a kind of exhausting getaway that has become the annual highlight of the year for me.

If you’re interested in work exchanges, here’s how I organized mine and how it allowed me to spend less than $700 while spending a month at a scenic winery in France.

I contacted the winemaker through their US importer, but previously used websites like Workaway and WWOOF.

Cost: $32

Although you don’t necessarily need experience to help with the harvest, I was no stranger to working in the vineyard: I’d previously spent time working with winemakers in Umbria and Burgundy, following a similar work exchange model there. I found these opportunities through websites like Workaway and WWOOF, which match travelers with exchange opportunities of all kinds (think: farm work, hospitality, childcare, language learning, and more). Most sites charge a small membership fee: at the last harvest, we created WWOOF accounts to sign an agreement.

For wine-specific ventures, I’ve also found it helpful to check Raisin, which compiles an annual list of natural wine producers seeking harvest help, or contact the wine importer directly via email. Domaine Christian Binner is imported by Jenny & François Selections – whose social media accounts I manage – so in this case I was lucky enough to be able to make contact directly.

To reduce my expenses, I took on overtime in advance and sublet my apartment.

As a freelance wine and travel writer, my income fluctuates from month to month. While I usually work from home when I’m traveling, I learned the hard way the year before that grape harvesting required too much time and energy to juggle other assignments. So I reached out to the clients I work with (magazines, digital publications, and a wine importer, among others) to discuss my free time and accept additional assignments in advance. I also picked up a few shifts at a friend’s wine bar to make sure I could comfortably cover my expenses.

Although my accommodations at the winery were covered as part of the exchange, it would have been a huge financial burden to continue paying my rent in Brooklyn while I was traveling. Luckily, I was able to find a friend of a friend to sublet the apartment to me.

I booked my flight with a low-cost airline.

Cost: $435

I usually pay for my flights with credit card points or airline miles, but I couldn’t find any direct round-trip tickets from New York City to Paris that would work well for the dates I wanted to fly. I decided to save my points and booked a ticket with French Bee, a reliable budget airline I’ve flown with several times. I flew economy with only carry-on luggage to avoid additional baggage fees. While the airline doesn’t yet offer ways to redeem points or miles, it does tend to offer reasonable fares (and Nicolas Feuillatte champagne for premium class).

I have taken out basic travel insurance.

Cost: 109 $

I always take out travel insurance for emergencies abroad. Given the potential physical risks associated with harvest work, I opted for even more comprehensive insurance coverage than usual. For this trip, I purchased OneTrip Prime insurance coverage from Allianz Travel, which covers me for trip cancellation, emergency medical care, and emergency transportation.

Food and accommodation were provided.

As part of our contract, the winery paid for my food and accommodation in exchange for the hours I worked. While some sites like Workaway set a 25-hour week as a benchmark for working hours, the grape harvest doesn’t work quite like that: nature dictates the hours to a certain extent, and when the grapes are ripe, they must be picked. Some days lasted from sunrise to late evening; others I spent barely an hour helping clean the tanks in the cellar.

I hadn’t asked much about the living situation before arriving, other than to confirm that I wouldn’t be camping, which is pretty standard for harvesters. (Although I enjoy working in nature, sleeping in it is just a step too far for this city girl.) I hadn’t even asked how many people I’d be sharing a room or bathroom with (one and eight, it turns out).

I couldn’t have been happier when I arrived at the charming half-timbered house in the picturesque village of Ammerschwihr. The picture window in my room looked out onto 70-year-old vines and I had a wine barrel as a desk. This is the house where Christian and his sister Béatrice (who does all the administrative work for the winery) grew up. Béa made sure the pantry was always stocked with food and coordinated with whoever was in charge of dinner (we took turns cleaning and cooking throughout the week) to buy the necessary ingredients.

While I had a few different expenses along the way, a group of us went to a typical Alsatian dinner (Tarte flambée and a tower of sauerkraut) at the delightful Bratschall Manala in neighboring Kaysersberg and took the train to Strasbourg on our day off – I managed to spend less than $700 for the month, flights included. (To put that in perspective, that’s essentially half my monthly rent in Brooklyn.)

Despite the physical exertion of the harvest, my mind is more relaxed than it has been in years. There is something meditative about the work, and a kind of magic happens when you don’t put a monetary value on the hours worked or the bottles drunk. Work, drink, sleep, repeat: it’s a cycle I get to participate in every year, and one that I romanticize so much that I tend to forget how exhausting it actually is. I’m sure I’ll be reminded of that soon – in a few weeks I’ll be heading out again to do it all again.