28 April 2010Vintage 'Intern' 2010 - It does rain in Central

It's Tuesday, and its being raining since Sunday.

Not a lot happened over the weekend - I had some time off to visit family in Dunedin.  Great to hang out with the kids and recover from the manual labour.  Back in Central there have been intermittent showers that mean little happened on the picking front on Monday, or on Tuesday.  Our efforts have concentrated on fruit already in the fermenters and on cleaning - followed by some more cleaning.  Then for a change do the plunging to keep the cap on the fermenting wines moist.

The workout continues to be good for the waist line!

It dawns fine on Wednesday, I get some video of the lovely red sun rise as I arrive at work.  However, ominously, the mountains to the west are shrouded in low cloud. 

Our two fermenters of Pinot are ticked off as 'dry' in the morning sampling.  This is great news - I have been on site to see the '36 bottles ' Pinot Noir through the whole fermentation process - I even have my photo taken doing the plunging of the cap to prove it.  I'll have to publish that one day soon! 

From now on we will watch and taste test the wine to pick the moment when the colour and tannin extraction are in balance and we can run the wine off into barrels to quietly mature and develop over the next 12 months.

At our winemakers, Maude Wines in Wanaka, we start to set up for processing the fruit that will arrive in the late afternoon / early evening and will be processed through Thursday.  Fruit will come in for their own wines and for other users of the Dan and the teams skills.  We clean fermenters and establish the fuit processing line for the next batches of fruit.

As an intern its not just about my wines but helping out with other folks stuff as well - and try to soak up knowledge that will be useful in future.

We spent the afternoon out to the Mt Maude Wines vineyard to help finish the harvest of some reisling and transport it back to the winery.  All is fine until the threatening cloud starts to deliver more rain.  Then it is all on to get this batch of fruit  to the winery and undercover. 

It will be a busy day tomorrow!