OK – we and our very kind friends, including Sue and Jacqueline who’ve come to help with the harvest, have finished the winery, tested all the equipment, cleaned everything several times over, cooked the harvest lunches and still we’re waiting for the grapes to ripen. They’re looking good. They’re tasting good surely it must be time to pick soon. More tests today – fingers crossed for a green light.
Typically the grape harvest starts up on the Plateau Cordelais in September but exactly when in September is a moving target depending on the weather, the grape varieties, the style of wine you’re aiming to make and, oh yes, the weather! The variety we think we’ll harvest first is our Mauzac. We’ve been tasting (and spitting) the grapes for some time now and this week we’ve started to get them analysed at our local Laboratoire
Our vines range in age from kindergarten to retirement (4-60 years old). In their early years vines need careful management to give them a long and healthy life – protecting their trunks, restricting growth and maintaining low grape yields. It’s a very labour intensive business more so when you’re dealing with vines that have been left to their own devices for a while. Our plantation of young Braucol was quite a sad sight when
Sorry, this is a bit of a long post just to bring anyone who’s interested up-to-date. We arrived in Andillac in late-January 2012 to begin pruning our vines – all 25,000 of them. There are lots of theories about the ideal time of year to prune but by anyone’s reckoning we started late. It’s possible to make a Horlicks of pruning and damage 2 years’ harvests (all a bit technical – happy to try to explain if you’re interes