With our grape must now racked into clean tanks, it’s almost the moment to start the fermentations. The problem is that as it stands, all the tanks are different – filled to different levels, with differing sugar levels and acidities etc. Of course some will remain unchanged – for example, the musts from our Estate vineyards that are used to make our Castro Martin wine, will not be blended in any way. The rest will be moved around to bring all the differing elements closer together in an attempt to give us slightly more uniformity. At this moment in time this seemingly simple job is, logistically, actually quite difficult as we do’t have too much space to work with, and so what follows is like a huge game of chess, but with grape juice.

Once all the movements are completed, and the temperatures correct for fermentation, we can start the seeding. We don’t seed all the tanks at once, as this would create problems further down the line, so by controlling the temperatures we add the yeast to only a handful of tanks per day. Slow, controlled and systematic, that is the key….

With our grape must now racked into clean tanks, it’s almost the moment to start the fermentations. The problem is that as it stands, all the tanks are different – filled to different levels, with differing sugar levels and acidities etc. Of course some will remain unchanged – for example, the musts from our Estate vineyards that are used to make our Castro Martin wine, will not be blended in any way. The rest will be moved around to bring all the differing elements closer together in an attempt to give us slightly more uniformity. At this moment in time this seemingly simple job is, logistically, actually quite difficult as we do’t have too much space to work with, and so what follows is like a huge game of chess, but with grape juice.

Once all the movements are completed, and the temperatures correct for fermentation, we can start the seeding. We don’t seed all the tanks at once, as this would create problems further down the line, so by controlling the temperatures we add the yeast to only a handful of tanks per day. Slow, controlled and systematic, that is the key….