We are now getting near to the end of our 2022 harvest, which has not been without it’s difficulties. Apart from the weather (when we missed two days of picking), there has also been an acute shortage of people for picking. Some of our team work two jobs during the harvest. Quite a number are ‘mariscadoras’, who work on our local beaches collecting our famous local shellfish from the sand (difficult and back breaking work). They always collect this seafood early in the morning, and only when the tide permits, meaning that some days they are available, and other days they are not. The hardy few do actually pick for us after they have finished working in the sea. The best attribute of these mariscadoras is that they are always very hard working and can be trusted without supervision required (except to point them in the right direction).

In our final days we are moving between some of our own, smaller vineyard locations, but also picking the grapes of some of our grape suppliers. These days, picking the grapes of our suppliers is becoming more and more common, as not only do they have a problem finding pickers, but also some of the growers themselves are getting a bit older. The upside of this is that these older growers really take great care of their vines, and also, the vines themselves are nearly always very mature and produce great fruit.

We finished the day in our bodega vineyard, which as the name suggests, surrounds our building. This means that the grapes are delivered from vine to press in record time. As we did not collect fruit from any other location it meant that we enjoyed a relatively early finish, especially for a Saturday. Hopefully, in another day or so, we should be completely finished – probably our longest evert harvest!