High up the list of hand harvesting challenges is gathering a sufficiently large picking crew. This is made especially tricky as you can’t fix the harvest date far in advance and because bad weather can scupper the best laid plans without warning. Yesterday Jack decided that our first parcel of white grapes was ready to harvest and happily this morning we had a full team of willing helpers at the house at around 7:30 am including a brilliant family of new American friends. The weather was about perfect for picking – cool and dry – and 4 hours saw us bring into the winery about 1.5 tonnes of our old vine Mauzac grapes.
Perhaps in years to come we’ll take a day like today for granted but to us this was a pretty special day.