Red Nose Day '09 - Do Something Funny For Money, 13 March 2009 

The Comic Relief Wines have come all the way from the SAAM Mountain Vineyards, located at the foot of the Perdeberg Mountain in South Africa.

The grapes were harvested in March 2008. At SAAM they use infra-red aerial photography to identify areas ready for harvest. Say cheese!

Red wine grapes are processed along with their skins, and for white wine the skins are removed beforehand. The grapes are chopped or crushed into a mush and are then placed into tanks to ferment.

Fermentation is when the sugar is converted to alcohol, and is achieved by placing the liquid at higher temperatures for a week or two.

Next, the wines go through the stage of 'racking', where the wine is separated from all the yeasty bits at the bottom of the barrel. The red wine also gets a bit of oak aging to give extra flavour to the wine.

Once the wines were finished, they were put into big flexi tanks and loaded onto a ship to the UK, where they travelled 6,015 miles by sea.

Our wines have been shipped by JF Hillebrand and MOL (Mitsui O.S.K. Lines) who put a very large Red Nose on the front of the ship!

The wines arrived at Tilbury in London and were taken by train to be bottled at Quinns in Cheshire. The Red Nose wine is in lightweight clear glass bottles which are easier to recycle.

The labels and special red screw caps were added and then they were taken to retailers around the country to be sold.

Click here to watch a little film of the journey of the Red Nose wines from South Africa to the UK.