Substantial investment has been made in the winery during the last four years, (4.5 million Euros in total). The winery has a capacity of 7 million litres of wine and can process 400 tonnes of grapes per day. For the red wines, we have modified the maceration capacity to 2500 tonnes, which means that all the red grapes can be left to macerate on their skins for up to a full month to fully extract colour and flavour.

For the primary vinification, all new equipment was installed in 2002>2004 including two ultra-modern vacuum presses equipped with a nitrogen gas injection system, ensuring gentle pressing in a completely reductive environment. A third pneumatic press has also been added this year for red wine production.
The production line for both red wines and white wines has been equipped with full temperature control from the moment the grapes arrive in the winery to the time the bottle of wine leaves for the customer.

Red wines can be cold macerated at 5ºC prior to fermentation. The red wines ferment for approximately two weeks at around 30ºC after which certain tanks may be left to macerate for a further period of up to two.

White wines juices are cooled to 10ºC on arrival at the winery and cold settled with the aid of pectolitic enzymes. The juice is then inoculated with imported dry selected wine yeasts from Australia and the USA to start the fermentation.

Fermentation of the white wines is conducted between 11ºC and 15ºC for around two weeks. In 2004, as part of a 4 year programme to replace all glass fibre tanks in the winery with stainless steel, 1.2 million litres of fermentation capacity in new stainless steel temperature controlled tanks were added. A further 1.5 million litres of fermentation tanks have stainless steel temperature control plates inside the tanks to cool the wine. This means that all the white wines can now be processed under full temperature control.

A significant investment programme is underway to update the winery equipment with the latest technology. The halls where the wine is stored during the year have been fully thermo insulated and air conditioned to keep the wine at a constant 15ºC during storage in bulk. In July 2005 a new cold stabilization centre was added to the winery, with capacity to process 200,000 litres of wine per week at -5ºC in a cold storage room.

A state of the art bottling line was completed in May 2005 and a completely new line will be introduced in September 2005 for screw cap in 25 cl, 37.5 cl and 75cl bottles. A Bag in Box line was introduced in January 2005 for 3 ltr, 5 ltr, 10 ltr and 20 ltr boxes. This major investment (700,000 Euros) will allow production of 4500 bottles per hour in fully automated conditions using the latest bottling technology - under inert gas to keep oxygen out of the wine, self adhesive labelling and fully automatic from depalletisation to case packing. ISO 9001-2000 certification and full HACCP accreditation was awarded in July 2005. All materials for bottling are fully quality controlled and purchased only from factories with ISO standard quality systems.