With all the controversy surrounding Formula One at the moment, and the problems with Pirelli, I thought that now might be a good time to change the neumáticos in our bodega too! Well, strictly speaking, these are not tyres, but rather the large pneumatic ‘airbags’ that we have inside our presses. A membrane ‘blowout’ in our presses during harvest can be just as devastating for us as it was for Luis Hamilton or Felipe Massa in the British Grand Prix last week.

Thankfully this is not a job that we have to do every year, but just once every several years. Sometimes it takes the form of an emergency replacement during harvest when a membrane is damaged beyond repair, but on this occasion it is a pro-active change, as we decide that one of the current airbags has reached the end of its working life. The repairs that are made during harvest can sometimes be the result of debris or a foreign object that accidentally finds its way into the press in one of the collection cases. Perhaps the most common example would be a pair of secateurs carelessly discarded in the vineyard. Obviously this punctures the membrane and caused rapid deflation in exactly the same way as a piece of debris on the racetrack during a Grand Prix might cause a tyre to explode.

However, that is where the Grand Prix analogy ends. We don’t have four helmeted guys standing at the side of the press waiting to rip out the old membrane and change it in under 5 seconds. For this job someone spends the best part of half a day sweating, actually inside the press, removing and replacing the hundreds of nuts and bolts that secure the bag (see today’s photo). Nothing glamorous about this job, and I suspect that the pay is not quite as high as a Formula One team either……

The annual job of servicing our presses is one of the first signs that this year’s harvest is not that far away!

With all the controversy surrounding Formula One at the moment, and the problems with Pirelli, I thought that now might be a good time to change the neumáticos in our bodega too! Well, strictly speaking, these are not tyres, but rather the large pneumatic ‘airbags’ that we have inside our presses. A membrane ‘blowout’ in our presses during harvest can be just as devastating for us as it was for Luis Hamilton or Felipe Massa in the British Grand Prix last week.

Thankfully this is not a job that we have to do every year, but just once every several years. Sometimes it takes the form of an emergency replacement during harvest when a membrane is damaged beyond repair, but on this occasion it is a pro-active change, as we decide that one of the current airbags has reached the end of its working life. The repairs that are made during harvest can sometimes be the result of debris or a foreign object that accidentally finds its way into the press in one of the collection cases. Perhaps the most common example would be a pair of secateurs carelessly discarded in the vineyard. Obviously this punctures the membrane and caused rapid deflation in exactly the same way as a piece of debris on the racetrack during a Grand Prix might cause a tyre to explode.

However, that is where the Grand Prix analogy ends. We don’t have four helmeted guys standing at the side of the press waiting to rip out the old membrane and change it in under 5 seconds. For this job someone spends the best part of half a day sweating, actually inside the press, removing and replacing the hundreds of nuts and bolts that secure the bag (see today’s photo). Nothing glamorous about this job, and I suspect that the pay is not quite as high as a Formula One team either……

The annual job of servicing our presses is one of the first signs that this year’s harvest is not that far away!