In my biological warfare mask ready to play with some D.E.

Fresh "cake" on the RDV, ready for filtering some lees.


All the fruit from the estate has come in. There was a total of 7000-8000 tonnes that came in, which is about 2000 tonnes short of what was predicted. As a result, Yealands purchased about 500 tonnes of fruit, and may end up purchasing additional fruit to meet their production totals. Word is that there is a lot of excess fruit in the Marlborough marketplace (as a result of over planting and folks without contracts to sell their fruit), so they have not had any problems finding the fruit. Yealands is also processing some fruit for other wineries. This is typically referred to as crushing/custom crush, and is done quite a bit in the industry. We are not exactly a "custom crush", but with the size of the winery there was an opportunity to fill up some tanks to make some $$$$. After all, it is all about cash flow, isn't it?

first bin of pinot ready to get crushed and destemmed. This bin can handle 20 tonnes of fruit at a time! It literally gets dropped/dumped off by the truckload.



Things have slowed down a bit; we are now getting 2 days off a week, and the shifts will cut back to 9 hours. This is turning out to be a very short vintage, and they will start to cut staff in about 1-2weeks. I am hoping to stay on board until the 20th of May, which may be a bit of wishful thinking. I am spending all of my time on the RDV which is getting old, but we will only be running it for about 1-2 more weeks. At that point, all of the white grapes will be fermenting or finished fermenting, and we will be working with reds only. We actually took in our first Pinot about 10 days ago, but it is for other wineries. This is a very small portion of the production, with 75% of production being exclusively Sauvignon Blanc, and then there is Pinot Gris, Gewurtz, Viogner and Reising too. Yealands will be purchasing their pinot fruit from Central Otago, which is regarded as one of the best pinot growing regions in NZ.
A truck waiting to unload mechanically harvested fruit at sunrise.


sunrise from Yealands.