Chateau Malaudos

We've taken you through all our trials and tribulations over the last year, right up to a couple of weeks ago when our tiny quantity of wine had a stuck fermentation. But the addition of lees from Hans' finished wine kick-started ours, and within less than two weeks our malolactic fermentation was completed. We received the long-awaited -mail from the oenologue, then we had to take in a second sample for verification. My heart was racing as I opened her e-mail a day later. Confirmed. Hooray!

Now we had to take the wine off the lees, and add a tiny amount of sulfite to stop the wine oxidising. At this point we had the first taste of the finished wine. We'd been fully expecting cooking wine, and had prepared a cookery book of red wine recipes to go with it, but to our great surprise the wine actually tastes good.

I like it - enough to have a second and third glass. And to look forward to drinking it. After all we've gone through over the last year I can hardly believe it.

Anyway, enough boasting. Ali and I spent a day and a half manually filling and labelling a very limited edition of 364 bottles.

Of course we're using the wonderful Zorks instead of cork for the closures, and I can reveal the full set of labels.

364 bottles of very drinkable wine rescued from a hail-filled tornado. We're thrilled to bits.