Our Grape Harvest

Our wooden baskets called "comportas" arriving to the bodega during the harvest

In October the fruits of our work comes with the day of the grape harvest. Photographs taken in 1900 show that virtually nothing has changed. The same hustle and bustle of trailers laden with baskets full of grapes and the same enthusiasm in the work. Whole families of harvesters come from Portugal as well as Spain, returning year after year, for whom the building of a house has been started on the edge of the Tondonia vineyard where they will stay during the harvest.

The basis of a fine wine is harvesting by hand, bunch by bunch, which no machines could equate. Cutting by hand, with the curved knife called "corquete", prevents the grape breaking and releasing must that could ferment prematurely. Here help is provided by the emblematic containers made in the López de Heredia coopery, which have a capacity of just under a hundred kilos. Thus begins the dialogue between grape and wood that goes on for years while the wine is maturing.

The last part of the grape harvest takes place when the containers are emptied into the weighing machine - in hoppers. From there the grapes pass to the stalk removing presses, which gently break the grapes to extract the must. This must comes into contact at once with the yeasts in the grape´s thin waxen covering.