To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether to call this Day 8 or Day 9 of our harvest. Yesterday, apart from some work in the cellar, our picking was halted for bad weather. Forecasts on Friday said that we should expect heavy rain for most of the day, whereas the reality was that it rained during the night, but by mid-morning it had stopped and then remained completely dry (and even quite sunny by the afternoon). Having said that, it was good to give our people a rest, as with a smaller team, they have all been working that bit harder.

On a bright sunny Sunday morning we re-launched our campaign, with the hope that in a couple of days we should be finished (hopefully sometime between now and Christmas!!).

Today we picked one or two of our smaller, more local vineyards (probably just over 1km from the bodega). Using a combination of tractors, vans and a small truck we actually managed to move everything into our grape reception quite quickly. With the presses working all afternoon the end result was that our bodega team did not need to work half of the night, and they were probably all at home, safely tucked up in bed by midnight!