The Last Grapes Have Been Crushed!!!

We felt like celebrating a couple of days ago as we crushed our last 10 bins of the season. What seemed like a neverending harvest season finally came to an end and we have all of the 69 tons of grapes safely packed away into our buildings. I can take a moment and reflect on the harvest and what expectations we can have for the wines we craft from the 2011 grapes.

What was truly a difficult growing year may have in the end produced some of the greatest grapes we have ever seen on our crush pad. I often talk at length of our terrific partners growing great grapes for us every year and their concientious work has rewarded us with what we think is a pretty terrific line-up of wines year after year. This year proved their skills as we received bin after bin of delicious grapes. I can't remember being quite so taken with the flavours and aromas of the whites we are working with. The fermenting juice is delicious! The reds are deeply coloured, bang-on amounts of acid, and slightly lower sugars and pHs promising ripe, lower alcohol wines. It all comes back to great farming. For more information on our vineyards and the people who run them, visit the Vineyards Page on our website.

Merlot falling into a fermenter

So now we are monitoring the white ferments and are busy punching down the red ferments. The Pinot Noir and Gamay have already been pressed and put into barrels and soon we will do the same to the bordeaux varietals and syrah. Our building is so packed with fermenting bins of grapes that we can barely slip through it.