The cupboard is bare

This picture shows a nice, cool corner of our warehouse that is normally stacked high with pallets of wine ready for sale, usually between 20 and 30. Today there is but one lonely pallet (hang on a minute, isn't that the name of a famous travel guide?)

Of course this is actually good news, as it means that we pretty much sold all the stock that we had prepared for the Christmas period, but on the downside, there is also a bit of bad news.....

Naturally we had planned to bottle more stock immediately upon our return from the holidays, but the full container of bottles that should have arrived during the first week of January did not make it - for a rather unusual reason. Believe it or not, it did not even start it's journey from Barcelona owing to widespread snow! Not snow in Barcelona, or even here on the coast of Galicia, but inland, across the centre of Spain. The same snow that brought Madrid to a grinding halt yesterday, causing chaos in yet another European airport. I hear that even the Germans, who are always frighteningly well organised, and well prepared, have been struggling with the recent inclement weather.

We have our fingers crossed that our precious cargo of bottles might arrive later today, or perhaps tomorrow, so that we can quickly bottle one or two tanks.