The good news is that all the hard physical work of the wine making is now finished, all the tank additions are done and pumping over (to mix them thoroughly) has been completed. All that remains are a few cleaning jobs – clearly we can’t do any real cleaning in the tank room until the fermentations are complete, and all the tanks are tightly sealed. It might be obvious to most, but the tanks have to be left open at this stage to allow carbon dioxide to escape (a by-product of the fermentation). Consequently, our blowers and extractors have to work overtime to remove all the extremely dangerous CO2 and replace it with fresh air. We are now reaching a point when we can start to talk about our 2015 ‘wine’, as the grape sugar is slowly transformed into alcohol, although it is still months away from being the finished article.

On a couple of occasions during the wine making process we have found the need to call upon the services of Alberto. Now, Alberto is not our secret wine maker or special advisor, but is actually a machine! And why do we call him Alberto? Quite simply because he is liquid counter – measuring the amount of liquid that we move between tanks. OK, so you have to be a cycling enthusiast to understand this one….. The Spanish for counter is ‘contador’, so his name is Alberto Contador (a very famous Spanish cyclist)!The good news is that all the hard physical work of the wine making is now finished, all the tank additions are done and pumping over (to mix them thoroughly) has been completed. All that remains are a few cleaning jobs – clearly we can’t do any real cleaning in the tank room until the fermentations are complete, and all the tanks are tightly sealed. It might be obvious to most, but the tanks have to be left open at this stage to allow carbon dioxide to escape (a by-product of the fermentation). Consequently, our blowers and extractors have to work overtime to remove all the extremely dangerous CO2 and replace it with fresh air. We are now reaching a point when we can start to talk about our 2015 ‘wine’, as the grape sugar is slowly transformed into alcohol, although it is still months away from being the finished article.

On a couple of occasions during the wine making process we have found the need to call upon the services of Alberto. Now, Alberto is not our secret wine maker or special advisor, but is actually a machine! And why do we call him Alberto? Quite simply because he is liquid counter – measuring the amount of liquid that we move between tanks. OK, so you have to be a cycling enthusiast to understand this one….. The Spanish for counter is ‘contador’, so his name is Alberto Contador (a very famous Spanish cyclist)!