Winemaking

2 posts

To Every Thing There is a Season

My favourite gardening magazine provides a handy “to do” list for each month: when to prepare the soil for the vegetable garden, when to cut the specimens for tree grafting, when to distill the slurry of stinging nettles…   In September we add the frenzy of harvest and in October the frenzy of the fermenting wine. Some years ago, when the November magazine arrived, I hesitated to open it.   The malolactic fermentation had finally finished;  the wine was “done” and pronounced good – a big relief after the usual weeks of worry.   What I certainly didn’t need that […]

Harvest

We were picking the grapes for our Rosé when the driver of an industrial harvesting machine passed by.   He looked at us and looked at our baskets and clucked:  “Hand harvest. That’s work.” Indeed it was.  But our family-and-friends hand harvest is one of my favorite rituals of the year.  We spend days preparing the rows, while John tears up reams of calculations trying to estimate how much surface area will translate into tonnage which will translate into liquid capacity of the Rosé tank.  Far from exact science since you don’t really know yield until the juice is in the […]