We’re coming up on a very exciting time of year.  In 45 days or so, we’ll be very close to harvesting the grapes and starting the fermentation process.  This is a really fun time for people to stay on a vineyard because of all the harvest activity!

While breakfast tends to be a little less lavish (because we’re already up and working) and there is some noise in the early morning (starting around dawn), you get a unique insight into the winemaking process.  So as long as you’re okay with those little discomforts, you will learn an amazing amount.

Here are some photos taken by guests visiting during harvest.  You can see there’s an opportunity for visitors to get their hands dirty and become winemakers for a day or an hour or whatever they like.  And once the work stops being fun, they head off to play in the vines and slurp a bit of wine.

If you want to play in our winemaker camp, just book a room at our B&B between the second week of September and second week of October.  We don’t harvest every single day in that period, but there’s always a lot of harvest season work going on.  Even if there’s a rainy day or something else to cause downtime, we’ll still be doing lots of interesting things like:

• tasting/testing grapes in parcels that haven’t been harvested
• tasting/testing unfermented juice
• measuring density and temperature on fermenting wine
• punchdowns/pigeage
• pump overs / delestage
• cleaning and maintaining press, sorting table, destemmer, sorting table, conveyor belt, etc.
• and much much more