Today we start picking in one of our most important ‘Family Estate’ vineyards – El Pazo. As you can perhaps make out from the photos, this vineyard has some of our oldest vines, many between 50 and 70 years old.

The final days of the harvest are always the most frustrating, as we sit and wait for the final grapes to roll in – more often than not, at the end of the evening. We try to keep our cellar team occupied with odd jobs, and indeed, we often send a couple out to help with the picking (with the proviso that they accompany every grape delivery back to the bodega to help offload them). Despite all this there is still a lot of waiting!

On my side, I am busy planning and then re-planning the cellar movements, the number of tanks that we are going to need to accommodate the must (and unfortunately the final number often has to be revisited). The movements can be a bit of a chess game – part of the cellar has clean must after racking, whilst the other half is the most recent must which is still left for settling. The reason I have to re-plan is because as the kilos arrive, we have to revise our totals, and therefore the number and location of tanks that will be used for fermentation (which we will start tomorrow). The concern that we have is that we are not left with half-filled tanks once all the fruit has been collected!