Our second day was quite different from a weather point of view – the clouds more or less disappeared completely to give us a beautiful, fresh, clear sunny morning. Apparently, we are told, that this sunshine is the shape of things to come, or should last at least until the 2013 harvest is well and truly behind us (or at least the picking part). We started day one with a very busy day, there was no gentle or gradual introduction day as we may have done in previous years – this year we launched into the campaign absolutely head on. The 2013 grape rush continued into day two – our target now being to finish all fruit collection in five or six days, trimming at least one or two days off our normal schedule. 

With just over 50 people picking in our own vineyards we managed to more or less finish our Castrelo vineyard on day one, and so today our team turned their attention to Cunchidos (a smaller location of just under one hectare). The fruit here was sucked up with a matter of a few hours, and so the entire team relocated yet again – this time to an even smaller vineyard, not actually owned by us, but managed entirely by Castro Martin. In some ways this is a very typical Galician vineyard location as it comprises only a few hundred square metres surrounding a house. In effect it is the garden of the owner, and takes only about an hour to pick. (Please remember that in a denomination of only 4,000 hectares, there are roughly 6,700 registered grape growers, meaning that there are literally thousands of tiny vineyards dotted around our hillsides).

At the end of day two our harvest crew had just enough time to move once more to our largest location, ‘El Pazo’ – our 5 hectare walled vineyard (or ‘Clos’ as the French would call it). They managed about an hours picking, still in prefect conditions, before daylight started to fail. Time to bring the curtain down on day two.

Our second day was quite different from a weather point of view – the clouds more or less disappeared completely to give us a beautiful, fresh, clear sunny morning. Apparently, we are told, that this sunshine is the shape of things to come, or should last at least until the 2013 harvest is well and truly behind us (or at least the picking part). We started day one with a very busy day, there was no gentle or gradual introduction day as we may have done in previous years – this year we launched into the campaign absolutely head on. The 2013 grape rush continued into day two – our target now being to finish all fruit collection in five or six days, trimming at least one or two days off our normal schedule. 

With just over 50 people picking in our own vineyards we managed to more or less finish our Castrelo vineyard on day one, and so today our team turned their attention to Cunchidos (a smaller location of just under one hectare). The fruit here was sucked up with a matter of a few hours, and so the entire team relocated yet again – this time to an even smaller vineyard, not actually owned by us, but managed entirely by Castro Martin. In some ways this is a very typical Galician vineyard location as it comprises only a few hundred square metres surrounding a house. In effect it is the garden of the owner, and takes only about an hour to pick. (Please remember that in a denomination of only 4,000 hectares, there are roughly 6,700 registered grape growers, meaning that there are literally thousands of tiny vineyards dotted around our hillsides).

At the end of day two our harvest crew had just enough time to move once more to our largest location, ‘El Pazo’ – our 5 hectare walled vineyard (or ‘Clos’ as the French would call it). They managed about an hours picking, still in prefect conditions, before daylight started to fail. Time to bring the curtain down on day two.