1st May
A Fruit Day becoming a Root Day at 0000
Wednesday 01 May 2024
Today I can celebrate the fact that my intermittent blogs now come with added colour as our new website platform alows me to include pictures.
So, we’re going to kick off with a brief summary of harvest with the glamour of added pixels.
This weekend will be the last and probably the toughest. Harvest is long done, see the picture of fruit, (Abel clone from Cornish Point) to get an idea of just how perfect our fruit is when it arrives at the winery. But we are now in the middle of digging out the fermenters, a job done by hand, or more accurately by shovel to start, famously ending with spoon, but at the same time we are racking the 2023 wines for the first bottling run in just a couple of week’s time. So, two vintages collide. Here’s a shot of James cleaning the barrels he’s just emptied. These have been already sorted by age, and the oldest barrels have left to enjoy a quiet retirement at Cardrona Distillery, where they they lend their gentle influence to both Gin and Whiskey.
There is no question that the Pinots are looking very smart indeed. Of course, we can’t see the nuance at this stage, we’ll need to wait for the end of Malo, towards the end of the year, before that starts to emerge. But we understand the broad fruit character, the weight, the balance, the tannin, so the big factors are there to be seen. Chardonnays are happily fermenting the last sugars on their their way to Dryness, and Riesling is still a few days away from the point where Blair will call a stop to the Bannockburn and lock in that harmonic between sugar and acid.
Fog has descended this morning, which means that there wil be sun just above us somewhere. Snow is staying on the mountains for now, but it will melt next warm spell we see.
It is getting time to pull the last of the veggies from the garden, but I’ll leave beets out into the winter. We’ve actually had a great run of late tomatoes, which doen’t happen so much here; you’d think that tomatoes would ripen well outdoors in a place that ripens Pinot so well, but tomatoes take longer than Pinot does, so they often run out of steam as the winter moves in.
Ten kilometers of irrigation pipe arrived last week, part of the programme to continue laying underground lines to help us manage irrigation alongside regenerative farming, which is a necessary part of our carbon reduction (we don’t actually get any credit for regenerative farming under the regulations right now, but we know it works, so we’ll do it regardless and cut the carbon, whether we get the credit or not). To run an underground irrigation line down every row will be 150 kilometers of buried line, a huge task. But we have been making steady progress and we will focus first on every alternate row (so, every vine will have a source on one side).
You can get the idea of how much it is all quietening, that I’m talking about irrigation pipe! But in the next few days bottling supplies will be ramping up until the winery will be chock full.
1st May
A Fruit Day becoming a Root Day at 0000
Wednesday 01 May 2024
Today I can celebrate the fact that my intermittent blogs now come with added colour as our new website platform alows me to include pictures.
So, we’re going to kick off with a brief summary of harvest with the glamour of added pixels.
This weekend will be the last and probably the toughest. Harvest is long done, see the picture of fruit, (Abel clone from Cornish Point) to get an idea of just how perfect our fruit is when it arrives at the winery. But we are now in the middle of digging out the fermenters, a job done by hand, or more accurately by shovel to start, famously ending with spoon, but at the same time we are racking the 2023 wines for the first bottling run in just a couple of week’s time. So, two vintages collide. Here’s a shot of James cleaning the barrels he’s just emptied. These have been already sorted by age, and the oldest barrels have left to enjoy a quiet retirement at Cardrona Distillery, where they they lend their gentle influence to both Gin and Whiskey.
There is no question that the Pinots are looking very smart indeed. Of course, we can’t see the nuance at this stage, we’ll need to wait for the end of Malo, towards the end of the year, before that starts to emerge. But we understand the broad fruit character, the weight, the balance, the tannin, so the big factors are there to be seen. Chardonnays are happily fermenting the last sugars on their their way to Dryness, and Riesling is still a few days away from the point where Blair will call a stop to the Bannockburn and lock in that harmonic between sugar and acid.
Fog has descended this morning, which means that there wil be sun just above us somewhere. Snow is staying on the mountains for now, but it will melt next warm spell we see.
It is getting time to pull the last of the veggies from the garden, but I’ll leave beets out into the winter. We’ve actually had a great run of late tomatoes, which doen’t happen so much here; you’d think that tomatoes would ripen well outdoors in a place that ripens Pinot so well, but tomatoes take longer than Pinot does, so they often run out of steam as the winter moves in.
Ten kilometers of irrigation pipe arrived last week, part of the programme to continue laying underground lines to help us manage irrigation alongside regenerative farming, which is a necessary part of our carbon reduction (we don’t actually get any credit for regenerative farming under the regulations right now, but we know it works, so we’ll do it regardless and cut the carbon, whether we get the credit or not). To run an underground irrigation line down every row will be 150 kilometers of buried line, a huge task. But we have been making steady progress and we will focus first on every alternate row (so, every vine will have a source on one side).
You can get the idea of how much it is all quietening, that I’m talking about irrigation pipe! But in the next few days bottling supplies will be ramping up until the winery will be chock full.
