Harvest Time

EQ and IQ

The wine at the end of the tunnel appears brightly as these two months of increasingly narrow focus, of declining physical, mental and emotional energy, give way to a sense of lightness, contemplation, softening. Slumbering even.

The harvest and all that surrounds it is a compelling and demanding time. All is heightened. It’s a time where vulnerabilities are laid bare. The weather and it’s vagaries test and threaten. The logistics of the vineyard demand. The Groundhog Day(s) and weeks in the winery create a blur of and in time. What day is it, what week is it, what vintage is it? Where’s the bloody fitting for that tank?

It’s a time for serious analysis, and I’m not talking pH and sugars. Every thing done, by any and everyone, has an impact on capturing a year’s work and how the market duly unfolds in a year’s time. These critical weeks of pitching in, working for the common good, striving for an outcome of excellence and beauty is marked by the generosity and energy of many contributors. As it is and as it must, these are viewed and reviewed, observed and analysed and appreciated and stored away for the quiet times of deeper autumn and wintertime.

Every year there at least 20 family and friends that help during these unremitting and challenging months. Every year there are a few new faces that slot in and add to the culture of this land, these activities and the resultant wines. Every year there are familiar faces that add extra layers to the collecting of vintage stories.

After a day of pressing, in a quiet moment, I was thanked for the opportunity to be included, to volunteer help. Further more, I was offered that it’d been a privilege to be involved. My immediate response was appreciation for the words and sentiments and that those feelings of gratitude for this place and these opportunities mirrored my own; that it is indeed a privilege, and certainly not a right, to be here doing what we do. Here there is the land and the specific sites, the ability to take the grapes and manage them into wine and we owe it back to the place and processes for the opportunities and advantages we derive.

We own not it and it owes not us.

There’s been a lot of energy around this celestial vintage. Whilst keeping the practical tasks of vines and wines in sight there’s been a lot of insight into people and place, into the culture of wine and its ability to enrich, to create and build depth into relationships.

I’d go so far as to say EQ has over shone IQ. Which seems about right, for IQ is the servant to EQ.

What a happy place to share and to be.