We opened our shutters on day three to clear, cloudless blue skies, and fingers crossed, our weather is set fair for the coming week.

As in the last couple of years, the only slight problem that we face at harvest time is recruiting good, worthwhile pickers. As with many other fruit crops around the world, good quality, reliable labour is getting harder to find,(especially as the grape harvest in more or less the whole denomination is concentrated into a period of just a few short weeks). Of course, we can simply recruit a lot of people, but experience has proved to us that many are not really good enough, easily distracted and working at a very relaxed pace. Naturally, we don’t expect our pickers to be automatons, but we do need to trust them to be able to work without constant supervision. Sometimes it is better, and actually more efficient, to work with fewer very good people, than a vast army of people just going through the motions.

Having said all that we are still working at a brisk pace, and grapes are moving through smoothly as soon as they arrive. Once the grapes have been pressed and the grape must (juice) is moved into our tanks, this still leaves us with the ‘bagazo’ (the grape skins and stalks). This bagazo is collected in small containers and then transferred to a much larger container, in the middle of our car park. Today’s photo shows this process.