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‘How was your trip?’ I asked. ‘You’re the first living people we’ve seen’ was James’s first dejected remark to us, after their long drive south to Bordeaux. Their Wine Adventure had begun.

In hindsight, it would have been better not to mention the price of a bottle as it dates very quickly. £6.50? These were the heady days when the exchange rate was 1.47 euros to the pound, and UK duty on a bottle was a lot less.

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You can also do this on YouTube by clicking on the video window above. While we’re on the subject of YouTube, it’s difficult not to laugh at this clip from a more recent episode.

Fair to say that by this stage in their relationship, they were letting their hair down.

In particular, effective spraying against the threat of mildew and rot was important, and the effeuillage in July, or pulling the leaves away from the fruit zone by hand, has kept the bunches well-aired. If they had been encased in a damp canopy of leaves at this stage, the grapes would have little chance of ripening and rot could develop quickly. We nearly bankrupted ourselves with the cost of it all – we had a team of a dozen or so experienced seasonal workers at times (left) – but it now feels like it was a risk worth taking.

This morning was cold and drizzly, so we need the weather to cheer up.

We have now finished harvesting the white. How we make it is pretty straightforward but there’s lots to be done. Most of the work has taken place in the vineyard, including cutting out, by hand, any bunches that are tainted by rot, but attention to detail is needed now at every stage.

White wine is made by fermenting grape juice, whereas red is made by fermenting grapes. And because we’re fermenting juice, we need it to be as fresh as possible.

So the grapes are harvested at night or early in the morning, and we transport them to the winery within minutes, eliminating the risk of oxidation.

After de-stemming, we lightly crush the grapes and push them with a screw-pump into a large, chilled tank (below, centre). The juice will get some ’skin-contact’ for up to 24 hours, depending on the health of the skins. 

We’ll then run off the juice into another stainless steel tank to settle, and we press the gubbins that’s left – tons of it – in the 5000 litre pneumatic press (far left). It has a giant airbag inside it, allowing us to press the pulp gently. The first pressings give us juice of lovely quality but we’ll taste check the last part, to see if we add it. 

Once the juice has settled in the tank – a process called débourbage when all the particles drop down – we’ll start the fermentation. The débourbage reduces the risk for excessive filtering later. We also filter the bourbes as we get a nice zippy juice, full of character, to add back in before the cool ferment.

Child’s play. For grown-ups.

I used to make the mistake of thinking that we had five days in a week in which we could harvest, from monday to friday. I then worked out that nature doesn’t take the weekend off, so Daniel, Nelly and I now focus on simply getting the timing right. Having not picked since wednesday 17th, the old semillon vines in Les Trois Hectares are ready to go. The grapes taste great, the analysis looks good, and the weather forecast is a worry for the middle of next week – and we’ve got a lot of white grapes out there. Over 13 hectares, in fact, or 33 acres. We could harvest the whole lot in a day but we’d lose the morning freshness.

We record the timing of the trailors arriving full of grapes to the chai, the temperature of the grapes, and the probable alcohol. It’s early and cold. 8℃. Lovely. 12.8 potential alcohol – good for semillon. 

At least the dogs get an early run out.

It’s chilly and dry in the mornings, which helps to stop any rot spreading, but jackets are off later in the day.

Meanwhile, it’s my job to taste the grapes, check on their condition, watch the weather forecast, and decide when to pick each parcel. The white crop is well down as I have reported before but the quality has markedly improved in most blocks thanks to the dry spell since the 13 September. 

The rot on this bunch stopped just in time – much more rain and it would been too unripe and acidic, and the rot would have spread. But now the grapes taste great – well, not the actual one I’m fingering here.  Notice how tightly packed the grapes are in a bunch of sauvignon blanc. Now imagine lots of rain being pumped up by the vine, dilution of the flavours, grapes bursting at the seams, rot spreading in the damp conditions…

We began the harvest this morning at 4 o’clock. We’ve hired the same man and his impressive machine that we’ve used since 2006, bringing in the grapes really cold and fresh before dawn. The flavours of the sauvignon blanc, from early ripening young vines, are superb. And with the early start, a Full Moon and the chill of the night, the grapes are fresh, crisp and juicy – with little risk of oxidation as they come into our winery within minutes of being picked.

Even if we could find a way to pick at night by hand (miners’ headlamps?), I wouldn’t be the most popular man in the village if I asked the locals to start at this hour. Thankfully, our loyal team of Daniel and Nelly, and driver Guy, are up for it. 

Grass down the middle of the rows can help, and it provides good competition for the vines, so we’ll have to sort that out in the autumn once all the alleys have been straightened out. 

Daniel, the guvnor, is back from his annuals and is out there trimming the vines. As well as keeping the vines in good shape, it’s a preventative step against mildew when timed correctly. The row on the right has been given a short back and sides, while the row on the left is about to be snipped.

These are vines I planted in 2001, and they’re just beginning to produce good merlot fruit with interesting flavours. We have to use one of our two smaller tractors because the rows are quite narrow at a width of 1.80m. With the gap of 1m between each vine, that’s 5555 vines per hectare. Far better than the 3000 you’d find in many Bordeaux vineyards, producing the same volume of wine with many more bunches per vine, and not far off the density in top Pomerol and St-Emilion estates. It’s much less than the 10,000 vines in a top Pauillac estate like Lafite, but then again we have much steeper slopes to contend with, and very different soils. I’m often asked how many bottles we make from a single vine: judging by the likely yields of just over 40 hectolitres per hectare, we’ll make about a bottle of wine per vine from this parcel. God willing.