Hi this is Emma! I’m the other Moody daughter and – having timed my annual holiday to the Hills during vintage – I am totally schooled up in what dad’s up to! I’ve been following him around in an invasive manner to find out all the details for you, and Maree is letting me borrow the blog so I can tell you!

So last thing we all knew, the harvesters were marching in to pick the Pinot Noir from our Charleston vineyards.

And march in they did! At 3am, at zero degrees, and with Rob in a very warm leather jacket supervising!

This particular harvester is actually quite fancy. As well as plucking the fruit from the vine, it actually destems the fruit too. You might remember, this process usually happens later on in the winery rather than on the machine itself. It’s efficient and gentle on the fruit to have it as part of the harvesting process on the actual machine though – fabulous technology:

The fruit looks really good, even though the harvester did pick up a few hard green grapes, which we weren’t expecting. However, since they’re so physically hard, they won’t crush and disrupt the beautiful juice, they’ll just sink to the bottom and separate out.

Once in the winery, the juice and fruit was tipped straight into a small open fermenter rather than having to go in via the crusher – that makes it gentle for the fruit.

Yeast was added after a day’s soaking. And here it is looking delightful:

What about my Somerled bubbly? Where is it?

A cry I am often inclined to whimper when I realise I have run out and live half way around the world!

Our baby 2019 bubbles is looking fantastic, thanks to dad, yet again.

We went up to Summertown on Saturday morning and picked in what seemed like incredible heat – it was about 40 in the city that day:

And here’s Paul Henschke on the quad zipping up and down the rows. The pickers fill the milk crates with bunches, and Paul zooms along collecting them on the back of the quad, to take them up to the top of the vineyard to add to the big bins, where they’ll stay til the truck comes to take them to the winery:

The cellar hands are here raking the fruit into the hoppers, which feed the new fruit to the elevators which take them straight to the top of the press! Doesn’t this look like something you’d quite like to drink while celebrating in a few years’ time?

SO much action around here this week! And dad’s still managed to make it to all the lunches and dinners we’ve had planned for the family, even if it did mean getting up two hours after we’d all gone to bed to supervise picking in the dark!

Cheers dad.

And just to cap off the week, here’s how our little sauvie is going:

Remember how stunningly green the juice was last week? Other wordly.

It’s sitting at 6 degrees at this moment, so all the grape solids are sitting on or near the bottom of the tank. Next step is to bring the temp up to about 10C, add the yeast and away goes the fermentation!

Happy to meet you, Sauvie 2019 and Fume 2019!

Can’t wait to have you in my wine fridge ….

Thanks for having me visit you on the blog, and I’ll try to drag dad out to lunch again now in between him peeping over all of the fermenters at the winery! Wish me luck!

Emma xo