Life between the grapes

Since a few weeks the vintage here in Marlborough is in 'full swing'. This means that nearly everyone is involved with something in the wine industry at the moment. The grapes are being picked and processed and with the rain of the last week the picking has become an urgent matter for most vineyards. The grapes were nearly ripe and the rain is causing all kind of problems with diseases at this stage and loss of flavours. So everyone wants to harvest at the same moment and the region is bustling and the roads are full of machine harvesters and trucks that are passing through town.

Last Sunday Blenheim even made it to the National Radio News with the following message: "In Blenheim the roads are dangerous because of the grapes that fall of the trucks at roundabouts and corners. Everyone who notices a truck that loses grapes needs to report the registration number to the police."

At school the excitement around the grapes isn't anything less. We have started making our own wines in small groups. I am very lucky to be making the wine with two great people: Hiro, a Japanese guy from Tokyo and Anya, a Russian lady from Moscow. We have picked Pinot Noir grapes and are processing these into a nice full-bodied flavoured red wine and a lighter and easy drinkable Pinot Noir Rose. Apart from that we have picked Sauvignon Blanc grapes which we are processing individually into a typical Marlborough white wine. We are convinced that our products will be drinkable (but upto now only we are convinced) and are thinking about our brand and marketing strategy already while we are busy with the winemaking processes. Unfortunately, everyone has to wait for a few more months before our product will be bottled and ready for the market.


To give you a glimpse of what we are doing, I have attached two picture. In the first picture you see Anya and Hiro who are inoculating our red grapes with yeast. The yeast is needed to convert the sugars in the juice into alcohol and thus making the wine out of the grape juice. This process needs to be monitored daily. In the second picture you see them with busy doing 'whole bunch pressing' of our Sauvignon Blanc harvest.

In between our work in the school winery processing our wines, we also had to do our first progress assessment (Computing) and a test (Viticulture) while we had to prepare some written reports (Science) as well. Needless to say that we are busy students.

Last week Marco visited me in Blenheim and joined me during the presentation of the scholarship. This was a pretty straight forward ceremony with hardly any attention from the outside world, which was a bit disappointing. But I received a nice certificate from Wine Marlborough the sponsor of this scholarship. To celebrate my scholarship we have had lunch at one of the wineries and did a small wine tasting tour in the afternoon.

The next day we have been doing a bit more of winetasting together with a few of my classmates, which also was a very enjoyable afternoon. Below you can see the view from the tower of Highfield Estate.

Unfortunately, on Saturday I had to work but overall we had an enjoyable weekend and I even think that Marco liked it better over here than in Wellington. On Sunday I brought him back to the airport and went to school to monitor our wines.

Cheers,

Anita