It’s my Vineyard

Fernand came today to check the 2006, wine that is still in the ‘cuves’ or vats. Untill the wine is bottled we need to add half a gramme of bisulphate each month to each cuve, this acts as a sort of disinfectant and is absolutely necessary to keep the wine in peak condition .
The small oak barrels, now in the cave as decoration ,that have been used in the past but not yet by us also need to be treated to keep them clean in case in the future we decide to make a wine with the flavour of oak that some conoisseurs appreciate. Fernand deftly suspends,on a wire ,a cotton mesh block of 250 grammes of sulphur through the barrel opening having set light to the mesh. before its descent.
It is now a legal obligation to mark on the label of all wines ‘contains sulphites’.This is not a nasty additive, without them ,as with other food and beverage products,the wine would suffer.