Day 7 - The final bunches

Herminda's office - who needs an Apple laptop when you have a Grape notebook?

(photo by mobile phone)

Whilst it was very nice to have a break from picking, today seems like a bit of an anti-climax. Having been in full harvest mode for nearly a week, it just seems really hard to re-motivate everyone, including myself, for just one last push.

The good news is that in a quiet moment Angela and I did a systematic tasking of all the musts, and all I can say is "looking good" - yes, we are very happy with what we have harvested so far. If fermentations etc. go according to plan then 2009 should be a very useful vintage. Expensive, but useful. (If you read one of my pre-harvest posts about grape prices, then you might understand where I'm coming from). Now I am not saying for one second that we make bad wines, and perhaps I shouldn't say this, but for me at least, the 2009 will be better than last year.

Finally, as the day wears on, and the grapes keep coming, we realise to our horror that we might have miscalculated. By the afternoon we have every available person out in the Pazo vineyard helping to pick the 'final' grapes, until in the end, at around 8.30pm, the daylight defeats us and we retreat back to the Bodega. The end was obviously not as nigh as we thought!