Abundance in the country estate

Arriving after two weeks away, we are greeted by lush roses, the last of the gladioli, raspberries, strawberries, lavendar and loooooong green beans. 35cms in fact. Have a look at these! They are lush and delicious. Sliced longways with my bean slicer they are bean spagettis, and served hot with butter and pepper.

We have a big decision this weekend, to make wine or not. A couple of weekends ago, Richard, David and I did the first leaf pluck of the grapes so the morning sun can get onto the fruit. The affect of this over the next few months will be to increase the number of bricks (read sugar). We want lots of bricks! Virgil, our wine maker came to see the grapes. to our great delight he was positive and encouraging. We are doing OK and have enough grapes to make wine. Each bunch weights 250gms so there are several kilos to each vine. both Saturday and Sunday saw us up at the crack of dawn, pulling the leaves from the central part of the vine to get as much sun on the grapes as we can. The picking date has been set as the third week in April. the plan from here is to do one more spray of sulphur to stop powdery mildrew, and then next weekend we will put on the nets which David has ordered. the nets of course are to keep the birds off the grapes. as soon as the grapes begin to turn to colour, the birds are in, so nets on. apparently last season the birds became wiley and dived into the nets and pecked fruit madly. Our deterrent to this is to peg the nets out to the middle of the rows. We will see if it works. Now we need to find a name for our pinot noir! I am keen on Blackrock Rd, Richard's choice is Resurrection vineyard, and David is keeping quiet, so far. We have discovered we now need to buy 3 barrels to store the wine in between making and bottling which is usually around 8 months. The barrels costs around $1200 each so we can easily see why wine costs what it does. We are hoping a lot ours will taste fabulous. Neither David and I drink much red wine, so Richard will be our taste expert. We are feeling delighted that our long hours and hard work is beginning to show real results. It is deeply satisfying to see the grapes looking like grapes should and the vineyard almost looking like a vineyard! I tasted one of the tiny grapes which had gone purple and it tasted sweet and delicious, a good sign.
We are watering both the grapes for four hours a day. Grapes need 1900 hours of sunshine to ripen ready for harvest. So now its a race between us and the birds, whether we can get the nets on before they munch through our potential wine cellar!!

Here's a shot of David and Virgil deciding to make wine with our grapes!