Harvest begins

Well, our first day of harvest has been and gone and, amazingly, it all went very smoothly - in spite of all the false starts over previous days.

The day began, as this photo shows, with a beautiful sunrise... (it also acts as proof that our team started before 6am!). We took off just under 13tons of Sauvignon Blanc, all before 12noon ... but then we did have almost 60 workers in total - a record for us! Stiaan, our new labour contractor for harvest, brought 35 as promised. But, having been misled by contractors in previous years, we arranged a 'back up' team from Klapmuts whom Pete went to collect at 5.30am, and local harvest stalwart, Davey, sourced another 6 ladies from Wellington. To top it off, some of the Donkerhoek 'die-hards' pitched without me even telling them to, at 7am to join in the fun.

So, for the first time in my farming experience, we had no shortage of labour. In addition, there were no glitches - no broken nor missings scissors, no harvest injuries, no vehicle breakdowns, no hold ups at the cellar - all pretty amazing really! We didn't even have to use our back up vehicle. Even the threat of power cuts from Eskom didn't materialise.

So thank you for all your thoughts and prayers. Keep 'em coming as next week we envisage things to get a bit tricky: with the way sugars are going, we might be asked to pick all the pinotage and chenin on the same day; we might lose half our labour, as Stiaan has other farms to service; we might also lose all the nice lugboxes (Jeremy will probably want them back for his harvesting elsewhere); and we might even lose the truck (which I rented for two weeks only - hoping to cover the duration of harvest - but, because of cellar delays and Eskom, we're half way through that time already with only one block done...eek!)