Today’s picture is not quite so glamorous – it shows the ‘fangos’ left at the bottom of the tank after settling. Following a gentle pressing, the grape juice (or ‘must’) flows by gravity into our tank room and is then left for a period of time to allow it to settle. During this time all the debris, that may include pips, skins, stems and even a little soil (or dust from the grape skins) will slowly fall to the bottom of the tank, after which we do our first racking. We simply draw the clean liquid off the top of the fangos using the rather odd-looking bent pipe that you can see in the picture. What’s left on the tank floor is not necessarily very pretty, but it’s better than allowing it to reach your glass!

I mention the fact that we are alone, simply because I have noticed that there are many bodegas in our area that have still not started to pick. Of course what other people decide to do is not really of concern to us, and I guess that the decision of when to pick is one of the elements that helps create variation in the style of wine between different bodegas (and long may that difference continue). For example, the grapes coming in today from our largest ‘El Pazo’ vineyard are perfectly balanced (sugar, pH and acidity) for our own style of albariño, and that’s all we need to know. To make a very crude analogy, it’s possibly a bit like roasting a chicken…. you leave your grapes on the vine until you consider them ‘done’, in the same way that you would leave your chicken in the oven. The only thing that I can say is that I prefer my roast chicken juicy and not dried out!

I should also comment that the pace of this year’s harvest has been relentless – from the moment we started the flow has been non-stop (pretty much the way we planned it). Obviously the more we do, the quicker we finish, and then we can breath that sigh of relief when all the grapes are safely gathered in. In fact, in the last four days the amount of grapes that we have processed has only varied very slightly, by as little as 3,000 or 4,000 kilos, and so you could say that the flow has been unwavering.

Until now, weather has not been an issue, but there is a possibility that the dry spell could break before the end of this week – we shall see.

I made a very casual comment on Saturday about the fact that it had been a busy day, without realising that it had been our busiest day since the huge 2006 harvest. It is a real tribute to our team, both in the vineyards and the bodega, that the day passed so smoothly – processing a huge amount of grapes in a well-ordered and timely fashion.

So, after one day of inactivity on Sunday (we decided that certain vineyards might actually benefit from one further day of sun), we re-launched the campaign on a bright, sunny Monday morning.

Picking normally starts at around 9.30am in our vineyards, despite the sun coming up at 8am – and the reason? Well, at this time of year there can be a bit of dew in the early morning, so we simply allow a little time for the grapes to dry off. Apart from this our people pick until 7.30pm, so even with a leisurely lunch break, it is still a very long day out in the sun.

Of course the secret of a successful harvest is logistics, and today we got off to a great start. By mid-morning we were loading the first press, and managed to get a couple done even before our short lunch break (the break in the bodega is usually much shorter, and I’m not quite sure why). This makes an enormous difference to our whole day, especially if we can keep this early momentum going. There is never a queue of grapes waiting to be loaded, and they pretty much go straight from the delivery vehicle into the presses. Of course this can make a huge difference to a fresh, fruity white wine like ours as any possible fruit oxidation is our enemy!

Ah! Now I remember, the subject of today’s post, my little boxes….. The boxes that you see neatly lined up outside the bodega are full of ‘bagazo’ (grape skins and stems from the presses). These are collected on a daily basis, not by the refuse men, but by the distillery who covert it into aguardiente for us (grappa or eau-de-vie, depending on where you live). Until a few years ago we used to do this on site, but a change in the law now prohibits us from doing this under the same roof as our wine making – again, don’t ask me why!

Today, just a short moment of reflection as we remember the terrible events of 9/11 in New York City, back in 2001 – one of my favourite cities of the world…….

As you may recall from my long history of posts concerning the weather, like all Brits, I am a little obsessed with the subject (it must be something in the English DNA). Anyway, to cut a long story short, today’s picture shows a photo of my computer screen taken yesterday – and the reason? Well, a very localised forecast taken from Spain’s National Weather Service AEMET, indicated that yesterday and today would be completely cloudy, but as you can clearly see, the sun is streaming in through my office window. Hardly a cloud yesterday, and hardly a cloud today – perhaps AEMET would be better served by employing someone to simply look out of the window! At this time of year, when we rely heavily on weather predictions, this hardly inspires any confidence.

Our first Saturday appears to be passing with peaks and troughs of activity – one minute hands in pockets, the next like headless chickens, as trucks of grapes seem to arrive in unison. There is an old adage in England – that you can wait an hour for a bus, and then suddenly three buses arrive at the same time. This is certainly the pattern that we are experiencing today….

Any Saturday, during any harvest is always the most frantic day of the week. Many of our grape suppliers are only part-time, in other words they hold down full-time jobs and only grow grapes in their spare time. (Of course many of the vineyards in Galicia are so small that this income alone could not support a family). The result being that Saturday is always the most popular day for harvesting, as the family and friends of our growers provide abundant cheap labour.

After a busy day, with presses working flat out throughout the night, it’s time to catch up on a little sleep.

Well, maybe not so much yellow brick, more a bit of brown cardboard really, but ‘follow the brown carton road’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. (At least we do have yellow walls!)

When I was writing about my old harvest shoes the other day I mentioned that when any spilt grape juice starts to dry it becomes really sticky and gets everywhere, well, we do at least take a few precautions in an attempt to minimise the effect. One such effort is to simply stick a bit of carton to the floor and make a walkway between the cellar and the offices…. it may not look very pretty, but it does save a bit of scrubbing when it comes to the big clean-up after the harvest.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, the early part of this week has been wet (as predicted), but a return to warmer weather looks like it’s on the way. We only need a couple more weeks of dry weather and we should enjoy quite a good vintage. The grapes that we have tasted so far are quite sweet, and already have good potential alcohol. As always we are just waiting for the acidity to drop a little more in a few of our vineyard sites. For those that already have a good balance, we will start picking tomorrow, so watch this space…..

This will almost certainly be the last quiet weekend at home before the 2010 campaign gets under way, but even so our thoughts never stray too far from the enormous task to come. Ensuring that everything, and everybody is organised, knows their place, and knows exactly what to do – it’s all a question of detail.

For me it was time to dig around in the back of my wardrobe and drag out my old faithful ‘harvest shoes’, (complete with go-faster stripes).The shoes in question were originally purchased many years ago as football boots made especially for all-weather surfaces – as you may see they have a number of small rubber studs, designed to give a good grip on slippery surfaces.

At harvest time, the grape juice that inevitably ends up on the floor is thick and viscose, that makes it extremely slippery. By contrast, when it starts to dry, its properties change completely and it becomes more like glue, horribly sticky and finding its way into every small corner of the bodega on the bottom of your feet.

Quite naturally, strong and appropriate footwear is essential at all times in the cellar (as the health and safety guys would tell you), but my experience in recent years always leads me back to the same old harvest shoes. Heaven only knows what I will do when they are eventually forced to retire!

My photo, taken only this morning, shows the first cases being delivered to a vineyard site, in anticipation of the 2010 vintage.

For the last week or so Angela has been busy in her hovel  laboratory analysing grape samples from different locations – it would appear from her analysis that some of the southern most vineyards might be picked as early as next week. Time and weather will determine exactly when….

After a long, dry summer our focus on the weather forecast becomes more intense – some weather sites are predicting rain at the beginning of next week, but with a return to fine weather by the end of the week. If this is correct, and the rain is not too heavy, then this will serve to clean the fruit, which may actually be a little dusty after the prolonged dry spell.

Following on with my drought theme, if you look carefully at this photo you might think that the lady in the white uniform is watering some plants….. not so, she is washing the ground. This is a daily ritual, come rain or shine, whereby two ladies with hosepipes spend about half an hour washing the entrance and pavement area outside a local hotel (which I will not name simply because this is not the point of my story). There does not appear to be any such thing as a ‘hosepipe ban’ over here in Spain, and in this way the Spanish appear to be neither considerate nor concerned when it comes to the waste of water.

It was only a day or two ago that Angela’s uncle Fernando (a local plumber), was telling us that his most frequent call-out at the moment is from consumers who rely on underground wells to draw their water….. the wells are starting to dry up, and so we have to assume that the situation must be pretty serious in some places.

Just as a footnote, I have always rather suspected that the Spanish may suffer a little from what I call “escobaphobia” – a morbid fear of brushes or brushing. The reason I say this is that if they see a few leaves or a bit of dirt on the ground, their automatic reaction is to reach for the hosepipe rather than simply taking out a brush – as I mentioned before , a serious mis-use of water in my opinion.

With only a week or two to go now we continue with our programme of pre-harvest chores – sometimes catching up with a few of the jobs you have been planning to do, but never quite got around too. One such job is laying a bit of concrete……

There’s actually something quite satisfying about putting down concrete, adding a new part to the building and its surroundings that will hopefully be around for years to come. This time we have made a small improvement to the entrance of our grape reception, making it just a shade easier for the grape-laiden vehicles to enter during the coming weeks.

As you may notice, our fashion conscious vineyard manager David is modelling this autumn’s latest uniform, incorporating some rather fetching 3/4 length pants, revealing just a modest amount of bare ankle (either that of he is growing rather too quickly for his age). Actually, the truth is probably more to do with the prolonged period of baking weather that we have been experiencing over the last couple of months – it’s hot work out in the finca!