Madam set off with the camera, while I stood around and watched, and with that particular lot of Shiraz de-stemmed it was back up into the Riesling block, where a few Cabernet vines were in the process of being picked by the winemaker himself.
Everything on the property is picked by hand, and, by picking these half dozen or so buckets, Steve was saving himself several multiples of $6.40. That's a significant factor when you're looking at the output from a winery that does all the picking by hand, since the buckets aren't exactly huge.
Start with whatever it cost to produce the grapes, add that cost per bucket and then throw in all the little extra costs along the way, and there's no way you're going to be churning out vast quantities of sub-$10 wines if you're dealing with handpicked fruit.
Readers will undoubtedly find further reflections along those lines over in the Rants section of the site and at The People's Republic of The Little House of Concrete.
There was plenty of photographic action for Madam, and plenty of points of interest for Hughesy, including a taste of the berries out in the vineyard and samples of the still very young 2011 wines, and, eventually, we finished with a brief taste, where I went for the Schubert Chardonnay and the Pinot Noir rather than the other wines I'd already tried.
We also took on a bit of advice re. Wines that might go down well in Sunday night's most likely restaurant venue which we expected to be Chinese with Mess Stagg.
Along the way a group of prospective tasters had arrived unannounced, while the scheduled crew had been running late, and I'd wanted to hang around till Rhonda had finished with the customers before heading off, which meant that it was much later than intended when we made our escape.
Having booked into the evening's accommodation, it was a matter of deciding whether to walk or drive downtown for dinner, and, with hindsight, driving might have been the better option.
For a start, eateries are fairly thin on the ground along Orange's main drag (or at least that part of it we wandered along) and anything in a side street wasn't going to be advertising it's presence with tables on the footpath in Orange in autumn with the overnight minimum diving into single figures.
We'd been pointed towards a wood-fired pizza operation, which turned out to be booked out (an example of why driving may have helped) but as it turned out there was a Thai place directly opposite that turned out to be quite satisfactory. from there it was back to the motel and, predictably, to bed prior to an early departure before reunions in Canberra.