Well, the day started bright and sunny as we would always wish, but there is now rain looming just over the horizon. We really need to gather as much fruit as we can, despite the shortage of people.

For our own picking team it was a day of movement, finishing in one location and then moving on to the next, ending the day in our vineyard surrounding the bodega. Of course the advantage of working on ‘home turf’ is that no sooner are the grapes picked that they are delivered and transferred straight into the presses. It’s a very fast process. (Unfortunately not all grape deliveries are so quick).

Today, we also started work inside the cellar, racking the first tanks after a period of cold settling (when all the dust and other deposits sink to the bottom of the tank). After this process the cold grape must, now in clean tanks, will be allowed to recover a slightly higher temperature before we can start the fermentation. Although we prefer to use a slow, cool fermentation, the wine still has to reach 13 or 14°C before it can be seeded with yeast, otherwise the yeast simply will not survive.

Today’s machinery saga was actually not inside the bodega itself, but rather one of our tractors working in the vineyard. We have a forklift attachment on the back of the tractor that we use for collecting pallets to load onto the truck. Until today, when the clutch started to slip! For the time being we will have to use a different tractor until the other can be repaired.