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| Our equipment just waiting for the grapes |
There was a last minute problem getting grapes from our old friend Chris at the Wine Grape Club. For the first time since 1978, there weren't any. We never found out exactly what happened but it was to do with 'transport and partnering issues which are too late to resolve.'
That left an awful lot of people scrambling for grapes. Gradually importers of grapes of which we had been wholly ignorant emerged as if out of a fog.
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| Massimo, Giuliano Jr and nonno Giuliano |
The principle one for us was Uva d'Italia. This company was founded by Giuliano Grasso after the war and imported wine grapes from Puglia for many decades, no doubt in parralell with the Wine Grape Club. Now Giuliano Grasso's grandsons Massimo and Giuliano Jr. are carrying on the business, grazie Dio.
Uva D'Italia's website mentions 6 different grape varieties without naming them. We decided to buy Syrah as we had never made wine fom this variety before. The pick up was from the Hannah Nursery in Sewardstonebury, London E4, near Enfield.
We found the place and collected our Syrah from the genial Massimo.
Initially we had thrashed about in our efforts to buy grapes emailing producers, importuning contacts who were very kind and keen to help but the fact was people wanted to hold on to every grape they produced. We know how that feels.
Then we had a bright idea. We still had a couple of wooden trays from a few years ago when, pre-Brexit, the Wine Grape Club had sold grapes from Spain as well as Italy and these boxes had labels on with the name and address of the producer, Frutas Pascual.
Thanks to this information we made contact with a wonderful person called Emilia Holman who said she could arrange for us to buy 12 trays of Tempranillo and six of Garnacha, These would have to come in on the back of a delivery to New Spitalfileds Market c/o an importer called Tydene.
All this was very exciting and a little cloak and dagger as it turned out. Private persons are not really allowed into New Spitalfields Market but the barrier was lifted after we mentioned the magic words Tydene and Fatima, the person from whom we were to collect the grapes.
We found Tydene but Fatima was nowhere to be seen. Someone suggested she would come later, around 9.00pm.
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| Your papers are not in order... |
Until she released the grapes no one had any authority to give them to us. We managed to contact Emilia in Spain in the meantime and it emerged that the lorry containing the grapes hadn't arrived yet so there was much frantic going to and fro trying to srt the problem out.
Eventually a lorry pulled up at the Tydene bay and Juan, the driver told us that he was aware of our grapes being on board.
When we tried to get them from him, the people at Tydene said Juan didn't have the right documantation so nothing could be done unless Fatima arrived which increasingly she appeared not to be planning to do.
Our grapes were offloaded and put into Tydene's store, There were some communication problems in that Juan spoke only Spanish and everyone at the market seemed to be Turkish without much English.
The stalemate was broken with the arrival of a gentleman who went not to a fork lift truck or to the loading bay but to a kind of clerk's table. We assumed rightly that he was in admin and we explained the situation to him.
To our joy, he seemed to know about the matter and even if his name was not Fatima, he let us have our grapes and off we went.
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| Our new Fouloir Egrappeoir |
This year we were able to unveil our Egrappoir (grape de-stemmer) for the first time. Bought last year it arrived too late for the harvest.
This turned out to be a fabulous piece of kit. It was fantastically efficient in separating the grapes from their stalks. We are sure this will improve our winemaking.
We had also managed to buy some really top notch (excuse the pun) corks. This we had managed to do by an amazing series of lucky chances. It's a long story but for years we had been trying to buy first class corks. In Genova there is an ancient shop called Luico (founded 1855) with every imaginable bit of equipment the amateur and even professional winemaker might require. There were at least three qualities of cork. We bought the best. In addition we bought some yeasts for re-starting stopped fermentations which you never know when you might need. The lady ay Luico was a fountain of knowledge and help.
Thus equipped we made four different wines from our grapes;
A 'Tempranillo 'First Crush,' by which we meant a light red or deep rose obtained by pressing the grapes immediately without maceration. We had done this before and were happy with the result. This time, the wine looked great but turned out to be almost sweet. That was disappointing.
A 'Tempranillo Normal' with 7 days maceration. At first we didn't have great hopes for this wine but it has shown signs of improvement. Perhaps a year in bottle will help it settle down.
Our Garnacha started life distrously. We left it to macerate so long that it finished fermenting under the cap. We thought it was ruined. It certainly didn't taste very promising. However, after a couple of months in our largest Demijohn (36 litres) we were pleasantly surprised at bottling. Garnacha is an easy grape to work with. We had found that out before.
Finally the Syrah. We left that only 3 days to macerate after the Garnacha experience. Intially we thought we has a winner but on bottling it seemed to have lost the freshness it had and was exhibiting those peppery notes Syrah is famous for but not in a good way. Again, Elevage might work a miracle.
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| Tempranillo, Garnacha, Syrah, Red Field Blend, Tempranillo First Crush, Gli Altri, Solaris |
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