After leaving the more open spaces of Puglia, the mountains of central Italy certainly impose themselves on you as do the winding roads test your nerves.  As Umbria is a land locked region these mountains eventually meld into more rolling hills somewhat like Tuscany with that rural patch work scenery. 
 
 For as far as the eye […]

Yes it’s been a while but worth waiting for. Vineman has taken a month off and traveled to the southern region of Puglia in Italy, the heel of the boot. This region is renowned for its hot climate, rugged landscape, robust red wines and Trulli (cone shaped stone dwellings).

The area I have settled in for […]

Following the Viognier harvest, everyone braced themselves for a bigger day with the Merlot.  Given that we were a few pickers short the previous day, I was right on to stressing with the picking contractor that more bodies were needed to ensure that the fruit is off before the peak heat of the day.  Things did drag on into […]

The past weeks have seen weather conditions range from a run of extremely hot days and nights, rain and currently mild to warm days with cool nights.
Ten days ago when we received 25mm of rain over two days I must say I was looking for the worry beads as I had only just commenced sampling […]

Well, following on from my last post, the nets won the race but not after incurring a small amount of collateral damage.
Organising a netting contractor proved more difficult than usual.  Not because they were all busy applying nets but because they had’nt realised that things were going to get frantic, the birds would suddenly move in […]