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.

Great father Bacchus to my song repair;

For clustering grapes are thy peculiar care:

For thee large bunches lade the bending vine;

And the last blessings of the year are thine.

To thee his joys the jolly autumn owes,

When the fermenting juice the vat o’re flows.

Come strip with me, my God, come drench all o’re

Thy limbs in must of wine, and drink at ev’ry pore.

Its somewhat new ground for me but will give it a go and see where it takes us.

Here is a screen shot to share;

Thought I would try to photograph a few of the insects on the grapes before they came off the vines as there are usually some fabulous spiders and other insects to be found. The pictures aren’t great as I had the wrong lens on, low light and without a tripod.
I will try to get these identified in time but for now I will just put the images up.

The image below is of a Nairobi Eye fly which leaves a nasty blistery burn on your skin if you rub it.

All said and done we had a Brix of 20, TA 1.25 and a pH of 3.3 so we should be ok with this. Will add the ML culture at the end of the primary fermentation this coming weekend.

Here are some images from Saturday last.

and then of course the girls helped with stamping on the grapes, which was great fun, until it got just a little too deep!

I will post the numbers again tomorrow evening with some pictures too. I love this weekend of the year, the fruits of all the love and labour that the team have put in all year, is quantified in those beautiful basins full of grapes!

Here are some picture I took on my phone at the beginning of this week.

Here my mother Meave, is examining the shriveled bunches that the fruit fly are into this evening.

A storm in the rift makes a dramatic backdrop and the bunches of Pinot Noir soaking up the hot sun in the afternoons.

However if you want to look around in Google Earth itself you can go straight there if you download the KML file ilmasinvineyard.

And here is what it actually looks like zoomed in a little on Google Earth.

Next time I fly over the vineyard I shall take a more up to date image from the air and put this up too.

In which case we are looking to harvest the fruit somewhere in late February or early March, depending on how much sunshine we get between now and then. The hot afternoons build up good sugars in the grape. At this stage we are no longer susceptible to bad mildew although we continue to monitor closely and to spray with a wettable sulphur.

Here is a picture of one of the bunches of Pinot Noir that I took on January 20th, 2010.

As you can see its all done on a very small scale here at Il Masin. The bottles are first sterilized over smokey fires in large “sufurias” of boiling water with metabisulphite. This began early morning with Muia, Mutiso and Michael getting this going before breakfast. One draw back of this cleaning method is that the glass takes a while to cool down. I worry about putting wine into a hot bottle - its got to get to room temperature in my mind.

A very efficient chain of responsibilities took shape. I sat on the floor with the hose attached to the bottom of the stainless steel vat, and bottle by bottle filled them with this years Pinot Noir.

Its very smooth and quite a lot darker in colour this time. It completed the Malolactic and six weeks ago I added some egg white to the wine as it had not fallen bright. I sat topping up the bottles by the light of a gas lamp, with Seiyias help from time to time.

The bottles were then moved on to the corking machine, which Alexia and Seiyia efficiently dropped a new cork into after each bottle was pulled out.

The cleaned and corked bottles were then moved into the next room where my mother wiped them dry and counted up from 200.

And then my father carefully steamed the shrink caps on to their necks!

Next weekend we have the sticky job of glueing labels on to the bottles. We managed a messy 30 lables but the smell of delicately barbequed quails painted with lemon juice and masala forced us to make our way up the hill for another fine lunch on my parents veranda.

Our rainfall for 2009 was as follows.

January 36.7mm, February 36mm, March 1.5 mm, April 104 mm, May 134mm, June 32 mm, July none, August 7.8mm, September none, October 58.5 mm, November 66.5 mm, December 60 mm.

Here are some bunches of fruit on the Pinot Noir taken this week. The bunches are a good size and we have a good crop by the look of the numbers that are on each vine. I confess that I left considerably longer fruiting canes this year to see if we could get a better crop. For some reason short canes at the equator struggle to produce fruit. We left 2 15 bud canes per vine with 2 or 3 renewals. In some cases we actually left three fruiting canes. However we have gone through the vineyard and thinned the vines a little to reduce the chance of mildews taking hold.

P.S. I have just seen a few comments that have come in since I was last online. Thank you and I will be getting back to you via email.