To Antwerp for the weekend to promote Pedra Basta together with our new Belgian distributor, Kris Jeuris of Wijnhuisjeuris (www.wijnhuisjeuris.be). I saw rather more of Antwerp than I expected as I tore a muscle in my leg whilst going through a run through the city this morning. Hobbling slowly back to the hotel through the deserted narrow streets of the city centre I was able to take in the architecture; traditional Flemish houses interspersed with some contrasting and captivating modern buildings. I limped to the tasting in the afternoon which was held at a golf club outside the city. Jeuris represents most of the best wine producers in Portugal including Niepoort, Alvaro Castro of Quinta de Saes, Filipa Pato (now married to a Flemish chef) and...well modesty forbids! Kris has a brother, Bert, who has recently bought a stock of fine Madeiras and is marketing it as 'The Madeira Collection' (www.themadeiracollection.be).  The tasting (organised to celebrate a decade of Wijnhuisjeuris) was a success with a continual flow of professional people coming to taste and hopefully place orders for the wines. I look forward to returning to Antwerp, not just for the wine but also for the beer and an opportunity to revisit the city.    

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Relentless rain, but fortunately it is still abnormally cold (5oC this morning) so vegetative growth is limited. My worry is that we will go straight from winter to summer and that weeds will explode into life. I want to reduce our use of herbicides this year by mowing in between the rows but unfortunately we still have too much stone lying in the vineyard (Pedra Basta!). At the moment the ground is just too waterlogged for any machinery to venture out into the vineyard. So we just sit and wait for the rain to stop.         

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It has taken nearly two months to prune the vineyard this year. The weather has been so wet that our team of eight pruners have not been able to get into the vineyard for days, sometimes a week at a time. The rain has been relentless since early December. Streams are full to overflowing, and the barragem on the Quinta is overflowing. There is water standing in the vineyard where I have never seen it before – everything is saturated. It has been the wettest winter in Lisbon since 1860 (where the records go back that far) and Madeira received nearly 500mm in just one month with devastating consequences. I was in the supermarket yesterday and all customers are being asked to round up their bills at the check out to support the victims of the flooding in Madeira. Locally I notice that many of the roads are cracking up. Signs have appeared, many of them looking ominously permanent, with the warning piso em mau estado (surface in a bad state). It is hard to see how the local authorities are going to find the money to repair all the roads built with EU support in the early 1990s. A few tiles have been blown off the roof of the adega and water is gushing out of the rockface in the cellar so it looks as though I will have to spend some money. More rain is forecast tomorrow and again later in the week. There is no let up from this miserable winter.           

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