Not a great year for fruit

This year the fruit trees mostly are not very productive. There were almost no cherries, we have very few apples and not a large amount of peaches - two types, one with white flesh and the other with orange flesh.  On the other hand one of our trees is laden with big healthy-looking pears and there are a lots and lots and lots of plums - Györgyi already dried some and made loads of jam.

The few apples and peaches we got look nice though :-)

Tartar

While racking the white wine, a piece of 'tartar', or 'wine stone', fell out from one of the barrels. It's about 1.5cm wide.

It's a lot of work

In the springtime we met people from Budapest who had bought a neighbouring piece of land. They spent a morning pruning their vines.  Recently I noticed their land is completely overgrown and they have no fruit.  I guess they gave up when they saw the amount of work needed to maintain the vines.

Not that I can talk, since Sanyi does all the heavy lifting :-)

Stainless steel storage container

We racked the white wine again in July. We had two barrels originally of white. After disposing of the lees, the remainder almost fitted into one barrel except for about 40 litres or so. Not sure what to do with this at first, I remembered the wine storage container I was given as a gift a couple of years ago. I went off to get it and cleaned it quickly. It stores 30 litres and the rest we put in some plastic containers.

The storage tank came with a bottle of paraffin which I had been told should be poured on top of the wine to preserve it.  Now, the idea of pouring paraffin on top of my nice wine was pretty scary, so I didn't do it.  Afterwards I got in touch with a distributor in Australia who confirmed how to use it, so will do that next time I'm at the cellar. This picture doesn't show that top of the wine is a floating lid, around which there is about a half mm of space where the paraffin should go, and then the main lid is placed on top.

This stainless steel storage container was manufactured in Slovakia. When I searched for such containers on the internet I found very very few links, and interestingly one of them was in English from a distributor in Hungary. My guess is that for home winemaking these are not widely used, although (larger) stainless steel containers are commonplace in commercial production today.

I'm looking forward to tasting this wine now it's been in the container for a couple of weeks (without paraffin on top) to see whether or not it has gone off. Hopefully not, although as the white is a bit acidic in the first place I won't lose sleep in case it is.

Poor 2010 harvest expected

Unfortunately we will have a poor harvest this year. The vines were cut back too late and sprayed too late, which combined with the mixture of hot and wet weather means many of the grapes have not developed. Probably we won't have enough to make it worthwhile making wine.