And we're off ......Harvest 2008 begins!......early in the morning on January 26th, we hitched up the trailer and headed off to pick our first half ton of grapes for the season - Sauvignon Blanc from Southern Cross vineyards, just down the road from the Donkerhoek cellar. Vineyard owners, Ros and Peter Koch led the fray with Danny Crous, our friends son from Botswana days (who has been an enormous help in the cellar for the past 3 weeks), Ros' friend Hilary and the Borg family pitching in. Of course, it took far longer than expected with our inexperienced team members dropping out here and there to find children, take photographs, tend injuries....but we got there! loaded up the fruit and took it to chill overnight ready for the crush.

We've had a cool Winter with high rainfall continuing into the early Summer resulting in a dream of overflowing dams and an extended ripening period. This should lead to grapes with intensified flavour and tannin ripeness, a fundamental building block of great wine.

.....A week later and the Sauvignon Blanc is in a small stainless steel tank fermenting away along with 10 tons of Pinotage shared between stainless steel tanks and open fermenting bins in a friends cellar at Mellasat, at the foot of the Drakenstein mountains in Paarl.

Although the cellar at Donkerhoek has been transformed since we moved in a year ago with improved insulation and a great deal more space, we soon realised that the grapes for the Painted Wolf Wine Company would need considerably more space than we had. We are extremely fortunate to have been able to rent space in a brand new cellar on the Paarl-Franschhoek road, Solms-Delta. So, the harvest began in an even more challenging manner than usual as we worked in three different cellars in the first week. A major exercise in logistics for sure!

The Pinotage grapes arrived in three truck loads (times have certainly changed since last year when we drove trailers to Malmsbury to collect the fruit!) which had to be offloaded by hand and the bulk were crushed at Mellasat. Our new team, (Ashley, son of the Wilmots who owned the bush camp in Botswana where we worked; Polly on sabatical from the UK; Willard and Lloyd originally from Zimbabwe; Maria and Nolene from the Northern Cape and us of course!) worked really well together bounding through the first load with ease in the shade of the old historic cellar under the expert guidance of owner, Stephen Richardson. We hand sorted the near perfect bunches of evenly ripened grapes as we loaded them into the crusher. Their delicious flavour makes us very excited about the wine to come....

By the afternoon we were dealing with the serious Summer temperatures of 40 degrees plus so well known in Paarl, and working like a fury to try to finish before the expected power cut which fortunately never happened - whew! Got the job done in record time though......

The remainder proved a real challenge at the Donkerhoek cellar where we battled to get our new 'old second hand' crusher working properly resulting in a very long day...but thats harvest time for you! Savannah and her friends did get to have a foot stomping session to get the fermentation going in the meantime....

We have a few 'new' machines this year which are in general improving work flow dramatically without taking away from the hand crafted nature of our wines.

Talking of which, the viognier has been a huge hit and has sold out with the Shiraz 2006 moving along well too - the Shiraz is now available at the "Vineyard Connection" between Paarl and Stellenbosch. We also plan to place it with further outlets in the near future, when we get the chance to make the calls! We have eight barrels of Viognier this year and hope to release this in October/November.

The Shiraz 2005 on sale with the Southern Hemisphere Wine Centre also formed part of their wine club selection - always good to get the wine out to new tasters!

Jeremy found exhibiting our wines at Winex in Johannesburg a good experience last year - I remember a poignant phone call telling me that he had a great position in the hall and was very excited and yet for the first time nervous now that he was the winemaker pouring his wine rather than somebody elses....

The two tastings we held in Johannesburg and Paarl went extremely well - Jeremy cooked up a storm and the wine and conversation flowed - great to see new friendships being forged and we thank you all for your support of our business. Please let us know if you need to replenish your stocks!

To those we didn't manage to invite or couldn't make it, please drop me an email if you would be interested in receiving an invitation to a tasting in Paarl after the harvest.

We would like to ask you to help bring us new customers by sending us email addresses of friends who you think may be interested in buying our wine. We will give you a bottle of our wine for every case we sell on a first order to a new Borg Family Wines customer!