Bottling

When we can find a free moment we really need to bottle some more of our 2010 blend. It's a labour-intensive process as everything is done by hand and with 900 bottles to fill it will take ages.

One person fills two bottles at a time, taking care not to over-fill them. The next person wallops in the Zork closures with a wooden mallet. After that the bottle is wiped clean and hand-labelled by another pal then, finally, the bottles are placed carefully, label side up, in a case and sealed up. A french case is six bottles.

After the wine has got over its bottle shock, which takes a couple of weeks, we make it available for sale. It's a huge amount of work to create a single bottle of wine and it all starts with the pruning. We expect to start pruning our 5000 vines at the end of this month.