In the end, it took nearly all night to clear the backlog of grapes, so it was actually quite stressful on day one.

We move into day two with a slightly overcast sky, and of course the threat on rain looming on the horizon. Most of the weather websites agree that rain will come, but the big questions are, when and in what areas (rainfall can be very localised and unpredictable being so close to the Ocean).

The thing that is perhaps puzzling me the most is that the majority of bodegas have not even started picking yet, and plan to start next week. It can’t be a question of maturity, because the grapes that we have gathered so far and quite healthy and ripe. I simply don’t understand why other producers would delay?

This year, for some reason, Sunday turned out to be quite quiet and uneventful, whereas normally weekends are our busiest days. This is the time when our grape suppliers have family and friends available to help with their harvest, but apparently not so much in 2023.

The good news is that, apart from a very short sprinkling in the afternoon, we managed to dodge the rain, until that is (once all of our fruit was safely inside), it did start raining steadily as we prepared to leave for the day.

After all the trials and tribulations of this year’s growing season, we anxiously watched all the local forecasts (albeit they were changing with every passing minute). With rain surrounding us on all sides the first suitable window appeared on Saturday 2nd September, and with deteriorating conditions threatening, we simply had to jump at the chance.

On a fairly bright and sunny morning we sent our team out into the vineyards to pick as fast as humanly possible. As we now use trucks for moving grapes the first pallets didn’t arrive until around lunchtime. We loaded the first press and the machine whirred into action…. for about a minute…. and then it stopped! Despite having both or our presses fully serviced only a week ago, it transpired that one of the circuits blew, and to cut a long story short, it took about an hour and a half to get it fixed. So then we loaded the second press…. same result… but this time a different piece. What a start!

The problem is that when the presses stop working, for whatever reason, we start to accumulate a backlog of grapes in the reception. Once this backlog occurs we never really catch up, and end up playing Tetris with pallets of grapes to fit them all in.

The good news is that after the first pressings the grape must looks very good, surprisingly viscous and sweet, after all the problems of our summer weather. Clearly, it is only the first day and we will have to wait to see if we can dodge the rain before we can make any definitive judgement on our 2023 vintage.

So today, we are finally ready to start our 2023 harvest. This year’s growing season has been complicated to say the least, and even in the run up to today, it still is!

Pretty much since the moment our vines sprang into life in March it has been one of the most difficult and unpredictable years, meteorologically, that we have ever had. Temperatures have been up and down, rainfall has been on and off, and weather forecasts have been largely useless, changing on almost an hourly basis. Of course, these are largely the worst possible conditions for grape growing. Indeed, very recently I heard one of my favourite quotes ever (made by another producer). He said that it was like “a jacuzzi for mildew”!! (If it wasn’t so serious, and so true, I would be having a good laugh). Suffice to say that, very much against our natural instincts, we have been obliged to give treatments, if only to preserve our crop.

The last few weeks have been largely dry, but with some wild fluctuations of temperature. Two weeks ago we had a couple of days at around 38°C (100°F), and then just a few days later it was down to 21°C (38°F). As the fruit started to reach full maturity we started to take samples (by this time we already knew that the harvest would be early), with a view to planning the actual picking. We decided that the very start of September seemed most likely, but then we looked at the forecasts! At more or less the exact time that we had projected, days of rain were forecast.

The solution we decided, would be to wait until the last possible moment, and then throw every resource possible at getting our fruit in as quickly as possible. So that is our mission for today – fingers crossed.

After a few weeks of good weather the last week or so has been very unsettled…. again. The rain we have had has not been particularly heavy, but certainly enough to penetrate the canopy, thereby creating the conditions that we dread the most – humidity!

The well-known British journalist Tim Atkin MW was visiting our region last week (we shared a very nice dinner with him), and so he was able to witness first hand the weather conditions that I had described to him over our meal. It certainly has not been easy for us so far this year, and at this point we probably only have about one month left to run before harvest.

It is a little strange, considering the conditions, that the harvest will be so early (probably the first week of September), as the sunshine has not been particularly hot, rarely exceeding 25°C (77°F). Nights have also been quite cool.

As we move into the final month, preparations are now under way in the bodega too. As always, we have to ensure that all our equipment is clean, serviced and working properly. Of course, much of this equipment such as the presses (pictured) are only used once a year, and so we clearly can’t risk leaving it until the last moment to uncover any potential problems.

With tanks now well into their fermentations, all work is now fully focused inside the bodega. After every harvest our second highest priority, after winemaking, is deep cleaning. Every floor and surface has to be cleaned and scrubbed, to eliminate the stubborn, sticky grape juice, and every piece of equipment has to be stripped and completely serviced ready for next year. The sooner that this can be done the better, because once dry, the grape must can set hard like varnish!

The warehouse space shown in today’s photo is the very same that, some weeks ago, appeared in my posts full of pallets (or sometimes bottle stock). Today it is not. There are many areas that have to be emptied completely during harvest to allow free access, and also to ensure that stock does not get stained or damaged in any way. Suffice to say that space is always at a premium at this time of year.

In the meantime, samples of this year’s must have now been analysed by an official laboratory, rather than just our own small facility in the bodega. The results are slightly different to ours, but in a favourable way. According to this lab the acidity of this year’s wines should be at a normal level for our region (higher than we thought initially), and also the alcohol should be slightly lower, probably a bit nearer 12.5%. Of course, these results are still not definitive, until the wine is completely finished, but they do indicate that we should be producing a very typical, Salnés Valley, Atlantic albariño in 2022.

For our final day the sun was beating down (as it has been for the last couple of days, with a temperature of around 29°C / 84°F). With one final vineyard left to finish we hoped that this would be a short day. As I have mentioned in previous years we have to wait until the final grapes are collected before we can load the presses. The weight of fruit has to be distributed evenly as our presses cannot function if they are only half full. Again, this would mean another waiting game.

At about 5.30pm the last grapes were in, calculations were made, and presses were loaded. All was going well until about 8.30pm when there was a very loud bang and one of the presses stopped in the middle of its cycle. Clearly, from the sound alone, we could deduce that this was probably a mechanical failure rather than an electronic issue. We were not wrong.

The press had only just started it’s 75 minute cycle, and was stuck, leaving us unable to rotate the cylindrical tank of the press in any direction. This left us with a dilemma. If the press could not be repaired then how could we remove the partially crushed fruit and move it to the other press? We were considering all options, including taking our shoes and socks off and using ancient methods!

In short, after more than two hours, the engineers were able to make at least a temporary repair, this meant that at least the cycle could be completed and we could keep our feet dry (at least for this harvest)!

Apart from this final drama, the 2022 vintage has probably been slightly better than we anticipated, and after a very dry summer, our yields (litres/kilo) were more or less normal. Now we move on to the winemaking (albeit this is already well under way).

On Sunday, as we moved into the last few vineyards the sun was beating down on us, with the temperature hovering around 30°C (86°F). To be honest it was quite a slow day, with just a little racking in the morning, and then waiting for pallets of grapes to arrive in the afternoon. In the cellar there is a lot of waiting involved, but regrettably we don’t have too much choice. Our objective is simply to get all the grapes in so that we can do a final count, and know exactly how many kilos we will have in order that we can calculate the final number of tanks that we will need, and how best the must can be distributed between them. It’s not quite as simple as it sounds.

Lunch at harvest time is a very serious business. Our picking team usually stop for between an hour or an hour and a half for lunch, during which time (on very hot days) they try to find somewhere cool to eat – in the case of today’s photo, under a tree. As you can see they are also very resourceful, building a makeshift table out of harvest cases and a couple of plastic pallets. Unfortunately, the sommelier was just out of shot when I took the picture!

We are now getting near to the end of our 2022 harvest, which has not been without it’s difficulties. Apart from the weather (when we missed two days of picking), there has also been an acute shortage of people for picking. Some of our team work two jobs during the harvest. Quite a number are ‘mariscadoras’, who work on our local beaches collecting our famous local shellfish from the sand (difficult and back breaking work). They always collect this seafood early in the morning, and only when the tide permits, meaning that some days they are available, and other days they are not. The hardy few do actually pick for us after they have finished working in the sea. The best attribute of these mariscadoras is that they are always very hard working and can be trusted without supervision required (except to point them in the right direction).

In our final days we are moving between some of our own, smaller vineyard locations, but also picking the grapes of some of our grape suppliers. These days, picking the grapes of our suppliers is becoming more and more common, as not only do they have a problem finding pickers, but also some of the growers themselves are getting a bit older. The upside of this is that these older growers really take great care of their vines, and also, the vines themselves are nearly always very mature and produce great fruit.

We finished the day in our bodega vineyard, which as the name suggests, surrounds our building. This means that the grapes are delivered from vine to press in record time. As we did not collect fruit from any other location it meant that we enjoyed a relatively early finish, especially for a Saturday. Hopefully, in another day or so, we should be completely finished – probably our longest evert harvest!

When we study the weather forecast for the coming days it appears that the rain is now behind us, and that we will have good conditions to complete our harvest over the next two or three days. We shall see…

Seeding the tanks started today, whilst the harvest continued in the vineyards. Our cellar hand Fran who normally helps us starting the fermentations was fully occupied working on the presses, and so the task was left to Angela and myself – not really a big deal, as we have a few years of experience between us!

The must that we are working with this year is actual a slightly darker than usual, a pale gold colour, probably owing the the extreme heat this summer. The other significant factor being that the level of acidity is slightly lower this year. Being located in the Salnés Valley, in the north of the denomination, we are usually associated with a bright acidity, which, when the wine is very young, can be a little ‘edgy’ – sharp, as some people describe it. This year we might arrive with a wine ready to drink straight out of the press!

Seeding was also a little slower than normal as many pumps and hoses are being used on the harvest. The pumps and hoses used for seeding cannot be shared as the other musts can be contaminated by yeast before it is actually intended. This is very dangerous in the wine making process. Consequently the seeding process for the day was not completed until 10pm, at a time when the grape reception is working at full tilt.

Today’s photo shows a large 300 litre container used for preparing the yeast – when grape must is added the reaction is quite impressive. Starbucks would be envious of this foam!

As you may have gathered from my missing posts, our harvest was suspended for two days owing to “bad” weather. As I think I mentioned a couple of days ago, weather forecasts (here on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean), can be especially inaccurate – and so it proved to be. The forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday was for a storm (the tail of a Hurricane), or at the very least, a lot of rain and wind. OK, so it rained during the night on Monday, and was still a little damp on Tuesday morning, but by about midday the sun was shining, and no doubt the fresh breeze had dried any rain on our fruit. In the end, we could have picked, albeit with a slightly delayed start, losing only a couple of hours. It was the same on Wednesday, except with almost no rain at all – dark grey sky in the morning, but with sun by lunchtime…. so much for this famous storm, and so much for the weather forecasts! Of course, the only positive from the inaccurate forecasts is that there was not too much damage to our fruit (water from heavy rain will be sucked up by the plant, and have the effect of diluting the pulp/juice within the grape).

Thursday was much brighter, and with a better forecast (fingers crossed!), and so picking started at the normal hour of 9.30am. Meanwhile inside the bodega, we have been working – indeed, all the musts collected so far have been racked into clean tanks and we will start seeding tomorrow. 2022 is going to be a slightly more complicated year in that we will be starting fermentations and continuing our harvest at the same time. Normally they are more or less concurrent, with one following on from the other.

In the end Thursday’s forecast was largely correct….until about 7pm! Just as our picking was drawing to a close for the day, the heavens opened, and it rained heavily for about 15 minutes. Our picking team were left dashing for cover, as the only thing that was protected from the rain were our grapes (with plastic covers over the pallets). Fortunately, apart from a few damp shirts no lasting damage was done and within an hour and a half we were enjoying a spectacular sunset….