Katarina's Blog

Harvest has started and you can hear the noise at night and in the mornings and smell it in the air and in the wineries. At West Wines we are in the middle of picking Sauvignon Blanc. All our grapes are harvested manually, most of them at night with the help of big flood lights. The exception is Cabernet Sauvignon which grows in our upper vineyard where it is too steep to bring in lights or try to walk around at night, so we start at the crack of dawn instead.

Wine bottles can have many shapes and colors. Sine we tend to use traditional shapes for specific wines the consumer can often tell just from the shape of the bottle what it is. But who decided this to begin with and why?

Pretty colors light up our vineyards right now. The winter cover crops are sprouting after the rains in December. Yellow mustard, green barley, orange calendula cover the space between the rows of vines. The plants are not only beautiful but they also play a big role in creating the best grapes possible for our wines. There are so many ways in which they contribute.

Almost all of our grapes are harvested now and we are at the end of a long period when I spend a lot of time monitoring the grapes' sugar level. Depending on the wine you make you aim for different sugar levels. I like to pick the grapes at the lower end of typical sugar levels which keeps a little more acidity in the grape and makes for well-balanced wines. However, the most important aspect in deciding when to pick the grapes is still taste. At the end of the day the subjective taste of the winemaker is the most important measurement.

Cork is a fantastic material. I love it. A natural bottle stopper from the bark of the cork oak. The cork comes from the bark of the tree which is harvested and then grows back again. Each tree can be harvested 12-15 times during its life which can be up to 200 years. Cork oak forests, today mostly in Portugal and Spain, are also a natural habitat for many species, some endangered like the Iberian Lynx. Before corks wine storage and transportation looked quite different. But cork also has its problems which the producers now has learned to mitigate.