Aug. 25
I visited to the vineyard of Kobe Wine in the early morning.
We were going to pick up Chardonnay grapes to make our original wine.
Our team consists of the stuff of Hakutsuru Sake Brewer.
I am a consultant of the project.
The grapes grew with perfect condition until the early August.
However, unfortunately we had a record long rainfall from 9th August.
The rain continued for 10 days and made a big damage to the vineyard.
I saw a lot of damaged clusters by the long rain.
The condition of the vineyard is the worst I have ever seen.
Fortunately, I saw some of good clusters.
Mr. Watanabe, who is the owner of ”R the Wineshop” in Kobe, and his daughter came to the vineyard to help us.
We pick us the grapes very carefully.
After pick up the cluster, we must clean up them in this time.
We cut the damaged berries.
The time and effort were needed several times as much as usual.
We were going to run out the picking before lunch but we had to work until 15:00.
We were very tired but happy.
We managed to finish the picking.
We got about 600 kg Chardonnay, which is less than half of our plan.
However, the quality was not so bad.
We were looking forward to tasting our wine.
After the job, I bought Kobe Wine Riesling to taste it on the Shinkansen train to Tokyo.
The Riesling was very nice,
I enjoyed the dinner on the Sinkansen very much.
I think I did very good job!
