Postcards from Portugal

Baby's first harvest

It’ll be a short newsletter today as I’ve been in Portugal all week for the grape harvest. I’ve been bouncing around between hand harvesting at organic winery Cortém and machine harvesting (not by me, you’ll be relieved to hear!) at Vale do Armo - both an hour or so north of Lisbon.

Despite having visited many wineries in the past, it was my first harvest and my first time watching the most crucial part of the winemaking process happen, up close and personal. And of course, it was very different from what you read in the textbooks: much less black and white, much more grey area. A lesson in how nature-nature and human-nature often fail to go according to plan.

I’m making a couple of little videos at the moment, which I think show the process much better than I could explain in words. (I know Substack supports video now too, but I want to keep this as a writing platform, so the videos will be over on Instagram @trufflesandtannins if you’d like to follow along).

For now, I’ll leave you with a postcard of my second favourite thing about wineries (after wine, of course): winery dogs. These furry friends kept me company at the quinta when I wasn’t working, and generally boosted harvest team morale. A very important job!