A friend kindly donated the fruits of his vine to us this year, and today it was time to harvest. One side of the greenhouse contained small, black, very ripe fruit, the other had larger but greener grapes. We grabbed all of the former and as much as we dared of the latter, reasoning that we really wanted only very ripe fruit but there might not be enough to fill the 10 litre fermenter I’m planning to use. This way we could see how far we get with the good stuff and then top up from the less ripe crop.

The fruit was taken to Port Erin for dressing, where we washed the grapes before de-stalking them and taking them back to base for processing.