Last weekend we racked the wine. The malolactic fermentation is complete. The pH of the Pinot is now at 3.5. Its not quite fallen bright but we racked it into a clean variable stainless steel tank. I decided to add the egg white to the tank again this year, and gave it 60 ppm of potassium metabisulphite too, which is the first sulphite it has had. I am quite pleased with this one. The free run Pinot is quite light in colour, with classic berry flavours.

The Chardonnay is going to be good although its still slightly cloudy. Racked this and added bentonite and metabisulpite to this as well. It rather hard juggling glass carboys but we don’t quite have enough Chardonnay yet to use the variable stainless steel tanks that we can use for the Pinot Noir.

The vines are resing, they look very dry and depressed - its their winter time now. We are looking forward to pruning and waking them up again mid September.