After last night’s rainfall, we opened our shutters to discover a bright, sunny morning, and so we headed out to the vineyards with our fingers well and truly crossed that it would remain unchanged.

We are still rushing to gather our very best grapes before they get damaged or diluted by either rain or mildew – it is still a very dangerous time for the fruit, and if mildew does take hold then there is nothing that we can do to stop it. It simply means that we lose good, healthy grapes. If this happens then it is obviously a very big blow for our vineyard teams who have spent the last 9 or 10 months, pruning, treating, taking care of the canopy etc. Seeing all the ‘fruits’ of their labour being consumed by rot it clearly something that we are working hard to avoid (as much as we can).

In the end our third day was very uneventful, with no unusual incidents, until, say perhaps, around 5.30pm, when the rain forecast for 6pm actually started. Certainly the amount of rainfall was too significant to ignore, picking stopped, grapes were hastily covered and a truck was loaded to deliver them quickly to the bodega. In reality, perhaps only one or two hours of picking were lost.

Today’s picture is actually from our first day, when a pallet that was being unloaded, unfortunately collapsed. I posted the picture on Instagram and made a very bad joke, saying that spilling fruit on the floor has no influence at all on “terroir”. (Maybe some would argue that it does!!!)