With the 2013 harvest done and dusted, I thought I might share some useless BLANKbottle harvest facts with you.
This year during harvest, which lasted about 10 weeks, I …
…picked thirty (30!) different blocks of grapes all over the Western Cape – including Hopefield, Darling, Wellington, Paarl, Paardeberg, Breedekloof (on the way to Ceres), Rawsonville, Elgin, Blaauwklippen, Firgrove and Upper Helderberg.
…picked 21 varietals – a total of 39 tons of grapes. That means I filled 2 635 lug boxes with grapes, loaded each of those cases on the back of my bakkie/trailor and drove them all the way to Somerset West. With the help of my assistant, we off-loaded all of them and I then personally chucked the content of each and every box into the destemmer – all 195 000 bunches of grapes or 11 000 000 berries.
…spent roughly 672 hours working in the cellar and between two of us drank 5kg of filter coffee. Even some useless facts are better left unsaid and I would therefore rather refrain from disclosing the amount of wine consumed…
…scooped out 20 tons of fermenting red wine must by bucket, completed 25 presses and ended up with about 50 barrels of wine, i.e. 23 000 litres/30 000 bottles/150 000 glasses and MANY sips.
I’m also much closer to my goal of driving my bakkie until it has 500 000 km’s on the clock! I drove 12 000 km in 10 weeks. I filled up about 20 times – R 18 000 worth of diesel.
Finally, during harvest, my beard grew about 40 mm, my assistant (in 3 separate incidents) tore his ribcage muscles, fell backwards off a 4 m high stack of bins straight through a table and fell asleep behind the steering wheel of my bakkie gliding into the barricades next to the road – AND survived. I only had one major fall but all in all we came through generally unscathed.
And THAT is why you haven’t heard much from me in about 3 months! In the next few weeks I will be releasing some of the new 2012 wines. Lots of stories there!