Thankfully another bright day to continue our campaign. Most of our more distant vineyards (no more than 10km) have been completed, and now we are working a little nearer to home. This being the case it makes transporting our fruit much more easily. Today we are not relying on any big trucks, but have reverted to our more ‘traditional’ method of a shuttle between the bodega and the vineyards using our tractors and vans. The downside of this is that we are moving individual cases by hand rather that using pallets and forklifts in the vineyard. In this way, it is a bit more labour intense, but then on the upside, with smaller, more regular grape deliveries it means that we can keep our presses ‘fed’ and working. (Using the truck method, we have periods of inactivity, until suddenly, we are faced with a delivery of 14 full pallets – about 10,000 kg).

Today we picked our ‘Bodega’ vineyard, just a small 1 hectare plot surrounding the wine cellar. Our tractors shuttle grapes straight into the grape reception, and so from picking to the presses can almost be measured in minutes, rather than hours! If only all of our vineyards we so close, it would make logistics a whole lot easier (and many a bit cheaper too).

Of course, the advantage of not having to wait very long for our fruit to arrive is that we can load the presses much earlier than some other days, especially when we are waiting for growers to deliver their crop at the end of their working day. Instead of finishing the presses in the early hours of the morning, our last press was completed shortly after midnight (albeit there is still quite a lot of cleaning to do after that).

Today’s photo shows the ‘bagazo’, or pomace as it is known in English. This is simply the remnants of the grape bunches after pressing (sent to the distillery to make ‘aguardiente’ (eau de vie or grappa in other countries).