Bottling Wine.

From the barrel into the bottle.

Wine is so easy to drink yet most of us don't realize how much blood sweat and tears go into making it. We've become spoilt by having wine on tap or rather unscrewing a top and pouring a glass never giving any thought to the labourious process gone on before.

Once the wine is ready to be bottled from vast vats it only denotes the end of a long year of pruning, harvesting, pressing and resting. But of course even the step of bottling is fraught with effort. Nice effort but a hard workout nonetheless.

Yesterday we preset the stage for today. Got the empty bottles sorted, organized the pump and filter machine and put everything into the right order so that this morning we could literally start the moment we arrived. Eight 'o clock was the start and the four of us ( my parents, Bob and I ) got cracking right away. The weather made it comfortable to be inside a warm wine cellar as today was a Baskerville kind of day - foggy and cold.

It took us five hours to fill most of the red wine and an additional fabulous hour to eat lunch at a local Buschenschank. Bob and I were just saying that this is our eighth year of helping out with making wine and it kind of feels great to have a new tradition of something both of us had never dreamed of back in South Africa. You know, drinking wine is easy but being allowed to help in creating wine is a step above...

Biggi