Yet another bright sunny day here in Galicia (although this is never a given at this time of year, and can sometimes change in the blink of an eye). Today our picking team moved on to some of our smaller, more local vineyards here in the village of Barrantes. This move was soon evident as our grapes started to arrive much quicker than over the two previous days working in Castrelo. (Castrelo vineyard is actually the furthest from the bodega that we own, albeit still only about 10km).

We have noticed that the quality of the grapes appears to be fairly consistent from all locations this year, and actually quite high quality. Earlier in the summer we were not overly optimistic for this year’s harvest, but the three or four weeks of hot sunshine that extended from the end of July more or less until the end of August appears to have changed the outcome somewhat. Also, with a forecast for fine weather over the coming days it is likely that the quality that we have now will remain largely unaffected.

An unexpected feature of this year’s crop is the potential alcohol originating from the high concentration of fruit sugar. It would appear (albeit it still early days) that we could have a finished wine somewhere in the region of about 13% alc. Having said that, this level has become much more the ‘norm’ over recent years, but as our fruit still retains a good level of acidity, we are now more confident that we should be able to produce quite a good wine in 2024.

Over the day the flow of grapes remained steady, all moved with some efficiency through the cellar, and so from a harvest point of view our third day was quite uneventful.