In all the excitement of the harvest I forgot to mention that one of our wines picked up first prize in a local Galician competition for Albariño. As you may know if you read my blog regularly, we do not actively enter too many wine concourses, but now and again an odd bottle slips in, and this is usually the result! In this particular case one of the plus points of winning the competition is this rather attractive trophy, which I think is actually quite tasteful – much better than any cheap-looking silver cup that we sometimes receive……

Meanwhile, back in the bodega, the post-harvest deep cleaning programme is well under way, and we have pressure washers working everywhere to remove the sticky, dried grape juice. As you enter certain parts of the bodega you have to be careful when you open the door that you don’t get a blast of water in your face, as nearly happened to me this morning (or perhaps it was on purpose?).

All the musts have now been racked, and we are about to start seeding the tanks, but before we do, I made one last, comprehensive taste of the juice. 2010 has produced a light, fragrant must, with a slightly lower acidity than last year (probably a slightly better balance). In the mouth there are floral overtones with hints of lime blossom, fresh apple, stone pears and as always, a very piercing fruit – very typical of the Albariño grape variety.

Of course we are a very long way off the finished article, but I am pretty confident that our customers will not be disappointed with the resulting wine. Now over to Angela to work her magic…..

In one way the 2010 harvest was similar to last year – mopping up the last few grapes on the morning of an eigth day, but that is where the similarity ends….. This year we have more fruit than last year; not necessarily because of higher yields, but simply that we have found some great new grape suppliers. As our sales grow, so we need to keep pace.

As always, the final day is a bit of an anti-climax, especially when there are so few grapes coming in. The adrenaline that has been supporting the whole team throughout the last week has finally stopped pumping, and the tiredness has started to hit home – we are finally on our knees (or perhaps I am just speaking for myself, and the younger members of our team will be out on the town tonight).

I have to make a special mention this year to Angela’s sister Elizabeth (or Bebe to her friends). For the first time this year Bebe took over responsibility for organising our picking team of  around 50 people. I have to say that everything went like clockwork – grapes arriving faster than ever from our vineyards, all the pickers happy and smiling, and most importantly the vineyards left clean and tidy – not a plastic water bottle, nor one coke tin in sight.

So, a big thank you to Bebe and her team, and also to our Bodega team – Fran working as hard as ever on the presses, Luisa on her computer (recording every single basket of grapes), and not forgetting David & Juan charged with transporting all the grapes from our own vineyards. A great vintage for many different reasons.

Thank you and good night!

Of course the truth is that it is really Day 6, but it just seems like we are repeating the same day, over and over again…. it’s never ending!

The last few days have been fairly manic for those working in the bodega (including me!), not only have we been handling record amounts of grapes, but also, as I mentioned yesterday, we are busy racking wines too. The greatest motivating factor for all our hard work is the excellent quality of the fruit coming in through our door, which is yielding an intensely sweet, clean must. It would appear that we might have some good raw materials to work with in the cellar this year. Only time will tell on this score.

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.