Gone Troppo!: The house that Jack built

But instead of a house, it's a cool room. And instead of Jack, it's Josh and Geoff.

Today, the boys built their second cool room together. We bought a heap of refrigerated cold room panels off Gumtree (as you do) and had them trucked up to us from the Gold Coast to Childers. They sat around for a few weeks while we waited for a concrete slab to be poured earlier this week, and then the boys put it all together today.

I'm quite impressed, I must admit. There was a lot less swearing this time around than last time, and they've done a great job. We ran out of glue (again!) so it's not quite done - but they will finish off the door in the next day or two.

The whole point of building a new cool room is to be able to increase our production of wines as we head into our second season of producing fruit wines. They've been immensely popular, so much so that we've sold out of the 'first round' of everything we've made and are well and truly onto 'round two' (and three, and four) of a lot of our wines. It's great that we have been selling them so well, but it's also really time consuming to keep producing our wines in such small quantities (a hundred or so bottles at a time).

By having more space to ferment and age the wines means we will be able to produce more at once, hopefully meaning we will be able to cut some costs by filtering and bottling all at once...and simply have more stock on hand.

As summer creeps closer (and the humidity increases!) a lot of the lovely summer fruits are also ripening up, ready to be turned into wine. We are eagerly awaiting our 2017 crops of mangoes, lychees, dragonfruit and plums and can't wait to get these back on our shelves.