Often the lack of sleep that we endure during the harvest is not necessarily to do with the number of hours that we physically spend in the bodega, but can, more often, be attributed to the dreaded nocturnal ‘to do’ list. That horrible feeling that you get in the middle of an (already truncated) night’s sleep when you either think that you have forgotten to do something important, or that you must remember to do something important the following day. The body might be desperate to rest, but the brain is still clocking up the overtime – hence the ‘to do’ list….. a piece of paper strategically placed at your bedside on which you can make notes in the faint glow of your digital alarm clock. I have to admit that this is a phonomena that seems to get worse with age, and boy, do I feel old this morning!

Anyway, back at the harvest, we have another bright sunny day as you can see from my photo. You can also see that our car park is full, which can only mean one thing; today we are playing at home – picking our one hectare vineyard that surrounds the bodega. With a team of around 50 experienced pickers this year, we expect to have this done within a few hours, when the whole team will then relocate to our much bigger Castrelo vineyard. It goes without saying that the order in which we decide to pick is 100% determined by the ripeness of the fruit in each site. Indeed, in our larger sites ripeness even determines the route in which we work our way around the vineyard.

Of course one of the great advantages of working on home soil is that the cases of grapes are removed from the vineyard immediately – they are in the grape reception within minutes, and pressed within the hour. You can’t get fresher than that!

As the day progressed, so the momentum started to build and by the middle of the evening we experienced the usual ‘sunset rush’. The sunset rush is simply caused by the sun dropping in the sky – as the gloom gathers, people stop picking, load up their truck or tractors, and make a beeline for the bodega.