Day two started as we would have hoped, with bright sunshine and reasonably warm temperatures – very good conditions for picking (for now). Our weather watch still shows that rain is on the way, if not on Sunday, then certainly on Monday, with the anticipated arrival of Tropical Rainstorm Danielle. Of course forecasts can change and sometimes be wrong, (owing to our proximity to the Ocean), but unfortunately this can work in both positive and negative ways.

One of our concerns leading up to this year’s harvest was the fruit itself. After such a long, dry summer our grapes were very healthy, but also just a little dehydrated. Fortunately, the heavy showers that we have had have changed this, and our first pressings revealed that there is at least a reasonable amount of juice. Potential alcohol seems quite high, possibly around 13.0%, and the level of acidity is also good. We will need more time (and more fruit) to give a more accurate assessment, but early indications are not too bad.

On a more practical note, no harvest would be complete without some sort of technical problems! 2022 is no exception. Apart from a very small issue trying to connect a printer in the grape reception, the main issue of the day was losing one of our two presses for more than 3 hours in the evening. Firstly, we had to wait for the on-call engineers to arrive, and then it took them some time to discover and fix the actual issue. As a result, Fran and some of our other guys were working more or less all night!