Day 2 - 20th February

After decades of doing this wine making thing, I have come to realise that, after a fourteen hour day, now is not the ideal time to write anything sensible. So I won’t. It did rain in a thunderstorm following a challenging day in temperatures hovering around 30 C for most of the afternoon. As you all no doubt already know, we hand pick all our grapes at Bloodwood. This means that we employ Homo Sapiens with hands which is our way of achieving that aim. This also means that the process is very expensive and, ahem..laborious.

Unlike machine harvesters which work 24/7 for a fraction of the price of our hand picking team, these handsy types CAN recognise bird pecked, mildew infected and sunbunt fruit before it enters the picking bucket on the way to the winery.

Also, unlike machines, they have minds of their own and today they decided that half the Schubert vineyard is more than enough to pick in warm conditions. At 2.30 pm, there was a general exodus which rather left us in the lurch.

Still, Mark and I lurched on and whole bunch pressed all they picked by 8pm. We will all have another crack at the crack on the morrow. And what we have in the winery looks pretty good from such a challenging year.

The wine making challenge when the planet is cooking is to preserve as much of our beautiful crystalline acidity in the berry before the heat respires it away. This is an advantage we have here in the Orange district so in years like this I pick Schubert with an eye on changes in pH and total acidity. I like to have a moderate alcohol level, a pH below 3.4 and 7 or so grams total acidity. Today’s fruit came in at !3% al (potential) pH 3.30 and 7.4 g/l T/A. Textbook stuff really. All I really have to do now is not stuff it up in the barrel ferment.

Because of the warm day, I am currently cooling down the juice and have added 5 ppm S02 to keep the freshness fresh.

And now I am off to bed to prepare my dead athletes body for the minions of the morrow..and because I really am not all that silly.

Cheers,

Stephen and Rhonda