After the catastrophe of hail about a month ago, the second half of May provided us with more favourable conditions. After a dry, warm sunny fortnight during the second half of the month, our flowering passed off without further incident. Now that we have fruit set, we are perhaps seeing some of the side effects of the inclement weather. It appears that some of the newly formed bunches might not be as dense as normal, with fewer berries, known as ‘coulure’ in France. This would not necessarily reduce the quality of the wine, but may indeed reduce the quantity, simply because there are less grapes in each bunch.

One of the most time consuming jobs of the year is pruning, and once that is behind us, we can start to catch up on other jobs both inside and outside the cellar, that have been put on hold. Springtime, is, hopefully, a time when our customers stock up on wine for the summer, and fortunately there has been a steady flow of orders coming in. There has been a fair amount of bottling and labelling going on (we often bottle our wines without any labels at all, as so many different markets have their own, individual labelling requirements and have to be prepared to order).

After more than six months of lees ageing it is also the time of year that we start to rack the first tanks of last years harvest. Of course, new labels also have to be printed in preparation for the release of our first 2025’s.