2007 - A very good year

I started this blog some time ago and thought I should continue it!

Today we begin to learn about Wines! Dieter, the man who owns the vineyard where we rent our cottage, has been very kind to try to inform us about this process. I'll attach some photos for those of us who are visual learners. I am excited to see this process from plant to bottle. First the fruit on the vine:

Beautiful! Is this a Merlot grape or a Shiraz?

Pretty amazing to think that these will become wine. So first they get picked, obviously! And there are LOTS of them.

This is only part of the vineyard!

In the cold room

This is like the cotton gin of grapes. It separates the grapes from the stems

Is this Lucas learning about wine?

Dieter shows us how the color is coming out after only 24 hours of cold soaking.

So after they are picked they are brought to the cold room where they are run through a wine press. The grapes are separated from the stems and dropped into one of these big concrete tubs. There they have a cold soak for a couple of weeks before the fermenting continues.

So there is the beginning!! The wine bottles were delivered last week, pallets of them! Stacked right outside our bedroom window. I'm sorry I didn't get a picture. They have already been moved to the cold room, so I think the bottling has begun!

I just thought it would be good to share with you some of the other important things we are learning as missionaries. Hey, when you live in a vineyard..... We try to go wine tasting on the weekend, usually Sunday afternoons. I am trying to have a more discerning palate. It's going to take some more work, but I'm beginning to be able to distinguish some of the different flavors. It's really quite fascinating. One weekend, we watched the wine steward take the cork off a bottle of champagne using a samurai sword. It's called "Sabrage" and it was very impressive!! Hey, this is important stuff!!