Post Harvest 2016

September 26th, 2016 | Bodega

the-dars-32So let’s talk tank space and yields. It’s actually quite a complicated story that begins as much as six or seven months before we even consider picking our first grapes.

Owing to our policy of only selling wines with an extended period of lees ageing it means that when we start our harvest, around mid/late September, we might still have around half of our previous year’s harvest in tank. Although these wines have been removed from their lees long before the new harvest begins, they still occupy valuable tank space (until such time as they are finally bottled).

So then we have to ask ourselves two crucial questions. Firstly, how much wine do we expect (or want) to make, and how many empty tanks will that require? Secondly, how might the weather affect the yields during the growing cycle? Never having any definitive answers so early in the year, we simply have to use our best judgement and get to work. For example, over the summer months we embark on a programme of bottling that will hopefully leave us with just enough tank space to accommodate the new harvest. That might sound fairly straight forward, but that’s why yields can be so fundamental, requiring us to allow at least some leeway in our calculations.

Of course the other significant consideration when calculating tank space, is that during fermentation we are never working will completely full tanks. Some of the additions that we make at this time can cause quite a dramatic reaction, and so we need to allow a little ‘overflow’ space in every tank to allow for this. It’s all in the planning!

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