Harvest update

During February the temperatures were a lot cooler than normal, more like March temperatures. This was great for us as the grapes produce lots of flavour when the nights start to get cool. The day time temperatures were also prefect, approximately mid 20ies. However this dream weather all changed with the coming of March. The temps now are more like Jan/Feb and this is bad news.

I sampled some Pinot Noir and found the sugar levels suddenly really high. So we decided to pick them. Unfortunately the guys who pick weren't available on Friday so we put it off til Monday. Over the weekend the temperatures continued to be really high and by Monday the fruit was really shriveled. We still picked some of it as the flavours are lovely.

Today we picked some Shiraz which was also starting to shrivel. We were going to sell it to a winery but there have been a few difficulties with transport, every man and his dog with a vineyard needs to harvest in our region at the moment..... so we are going to make it into some wine ourselves as we can't get it to the winery.

So now I get to have some fun and make some wine! We crushed the Pinot Noir and some Gamay today, its now in half tonne bins in the cold room. I can see already this wine making business is going to give me an upper body work out, mixing sulfur and tartaric acid through the crushed grapes was not as easy as I suspected.

We are going to crush the Shiraz in a few days. Hopefully the machine harvester will be here tomorrow night and then we will need to hand pick the grapes for Dads wine. Busy busy busy. The number of days I see the sunrise is scaring me....