Chardonnay bubbling along

It's the weekend and the tanks are bubbling away with wonderful smells coming out of the cellar.

Major cleanup work is ahead of us. The outside of the cellar has seen better days and some paint would work wonders. The weather has finally reached more normal temperatures. It was unusually cool the past few days.

The guesthouse is having an intermediate quiet phase, but more overseas visitors are due to arrive and we ought to be busy again once the harvest is in full swing. Everything happens all at once, but one gets used to it. We have now finished the painting of the stoops and it looks brand-new again.

Enough writing. The swimming pool is calling!

Chardonnay is in the cellar

The new tanks came in handy - their size is exactly what we needed. We left a third of the grapes for a potential late harvest in the vineyard and will decide later if we'll make a sweet dessert wine as well. I still like the idea of having a large variety of wines on offer rather than large volumes of one style of wine.

The quality has been outstanding and it was a pleasure to see how healthy the grapes are after so many doom and gloom opinions about organic vineyards.

Promising talks with our Dutch friends will hopefully result in a close cooperation that will ultimately cut out any middlemen and get our wines to the Netherlands and northern Europe at competitive prices.

Meanwhile, we're painting all our buildings in pristine white and stoops in traditional red. Since we moved our ostriches to the front camp we are miraculously finding eggs. ;) We never had any before while out of sight on the mountain slopes of the farm.

On a private note: My little (she is taller than me) girl has her first job as a journalist secured in Johannesburg and moves into her first flat this weekend. A very exciting moment in a young person's life. Good luck, Ines!