20 September Update

Our fourth set of visitors this summer left after a good few days, weather-wise, and we enjoyed having them here. The builders have started on the pool - an Ash tree has come down and there's an ever-widening hole growing in the garden. Meanwhile, I managed to catch a fleeting shot of a red squirrel enjoying the fruits of the walnut tree (it's left more than enough for us though!) Here it is running up the fence into the tree very fast, hence the blur.

We've got far too many walnuts to eat so I'm looking at getting a press to extract the oil, which we can use for salads and cooking. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall used one for hemp seeds on his TV programme this week - the same model will do all sorts of nuts and seeds.

Winemaking

Rhys has been having a go at making some wine! We inherited a row of grape vines with the house - about a dozen vines of two or three different varieties, but we don't know what they are. The previous owner said they were eating / table grapes but there are far too many to eat. We picked them this week and there were 69kg of grapes.

As you can probably see they're not all ripe but some were over-ripe and wasps etc. were starting to get at them, so we thought they'd better come off. Also quite a few are rather small so we probably need to prune the bunches while they're growing next year, to get bigger grapes. About two thirds of them are black, the rest white.

We bought some kit to make them into wine (we hope!) and David and Lynne helped us to strip the grapes from their stalks. After mashing the fruit up we put the lot into kegs with their skins so we aim to get red wine but its a lot of trouble keeping the skins below the liquid. Anyway we've now removed the skins and the must is fermenting nicely with the addition of some wine yeast (as well as the natural yeast) and sugar.

Rhys now needs to be patient and leave them to do their thing for a while! The must is now all in one big keg with an airlock, but probably a bit too much headroom at the top.

We'd better get collecting some bottles to decant it into when it's finished - fortunately that's not too hard here with lots of good wine on the table from Bordeaux, the Medoc and Blaye nearby. Good excuse for a bottle or two more as we need the bottles. We'll let you know how ours turns out (unless it all turns into vinegar!)

Two lots of visitors

We've been delighted to have two lots of visitors over the last few weeks. First Jennie, Ian and Dorothy flew in for a few days, but unfortunately the weather wasn't great. However they seemed to enjoy themselves, and here is Jennie on the lawn tractor. Plenty more behind her still to cut though.

Then last week we had David, Lynne and Charlie to stay. They had mostly very good weather - up into the 30's C. We took them out to the beach at St Georges de Didonne one day; here he is with Jean on the sands:

And here are another couple of pictures of Charlie - one concentrating hard on his strawberry ice-cream at the Coq d'Or in Jonzac, and the other at our house.

David and Lynne helped with a few of the jobs including in the garden and stripping the grapes from their stalks ready for making into wine (we hope!) but there are still plenty to go at so we'd better get on with it.