And more pressing...

It seems that this year I was meant to spend a lot of time shoveling grape skins.  Last weekend Matt and I pressed our two largest vats.  Usually we have some help, but it turned out that our normally reliable friends were all busy!  Imagine that?  Who wouldn't want to spend their weekend covered in grape skins and wine, doing back breaking work??  Well, it wasn't so bad.  We were tired at the end, but we go it all done on Saturday.   On Sunday we spent the day cleaning it all up.  That's the worst part of harvest, all the clean up.  It seems like you'll never get rid of all the little bits of grape skins that are stuck to seemingly everything!  Power washers are the way to go.  I can't imagine how wineries got by before the invention of the power washer.  Especially when you're cleaning out the press.

Once you've finished, there's a mountain of grape skins sitting in the back yard, that luckily, here in France, are disposed of for you by the friendly folks at the distillery.  Well, in fact, we don't really have a choice, we are required to supply a certain amount of either grape skins, lees or wine to the state each year, as a sort of tax that is levied on the wineries.  The distillery then turns all of these lovely skins into alcohol.  This is in some ways a good thing and in some ways not.  The good thing is that your skins are disposed of quickly and the fruit flies disappear soon afterwards.  The bad thing is that if we weren't required to give them to the state we could compost them and use them as fertilizer for the vines, but that means that we'd have to clean it all up ourselves, so in the end I might be able to live with that!