For those of you that don't know I'm a winemaker, and so obviously I would find work at a winery!

First off some stats on the winery in question.

Name: Clos Du Val Wine Co.

Annual production: 75 000 cases.

Premium wines:

Red: Clos Du Val Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.

White:Clos Du Val Reserve Chardonnay.



This is what the winery complex looks like.



This is the typical view from the employee car park at 7:30AM. Beautiful, huh?



These are the first grapes of the vintage being tipped into the crusher. For those of you who are interested the type was Syrah, and we crushed 27 tonnes which was toasted with good Australian Champagne.



This is the number two barrel hall. Assuming that each row has 70 barrels in it that means in this photo there are approximatly 2100 barrels!!!

. Well now for some pictures of me actually working, this first one is one of me doing a really vital job.....



Making the coffee!!!

But seriously, here is one of me actually doing something wine related.



What I'm doing is draining a red fermenter, this one had some of the wine made from the first grapes crushed this vintage. As this can be a very messy job you can see I'm wearing my protective clothing.



Here is what it looks like when grapes are tipped into the crusher/destemer's hopper.

Towards the end of crushing, this picture was actually taken on the last day of crushing, we had to cram as much into the presses as possible.



This is what it looks like when you try to cram 11 tonnes into a ten tonne press!

Now that we are finished crushing all that is let to do is to press the reds of skins and then babysit the maturing wines. You've already seen how we drain our red fermenters,



here you can see that draining our reds is a drop by drop process. This photo was taken right at the end of this process on a 20 tonne lot of Cabernet Franc, the colour and clarity at this early stage is truely great. This bodes well for this wine.

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