Annual vineyard blog update – better late than never…
I always have to take a moment to ponder before trying to write one of these blogs because inevitably so much as passed in (this case) over a year. I’ll start with the really big news – which is totally not vineyard related but impacts on just about everything we do at the moment, which is that Ryan and I are now parents. Reuben came along in July and not surprisingly we decided not to book anything vineyard related in July and August. He’s a lovely little chap and is totally disinterested in the vineyard presently. It will be interesting to see how he gets on out there when we do the pruning. He might be big enough to sit up in his pram and see what we are doing (and be less bored). He’s already becoming a fixture at farmers markets.
It would be right to start the blog from the beginning of the year when Ryan and I pruned the vineyard ourselves. We managed to do all the pruning but very few post replacements - I wasn’t in a physical state to be helping post bashing. Ryan managed two end posts and that wasn’t enough as in the summer two other end posts collapsed, taking down some vines with them. It means that this winter we’ve got a big job on that front and probably about 20 posts need changing.
Whilst we managed to prune we also fell behind on tying up the vines on time. We were then frosted…again. This time it was only to -0.5C. Remarkably the amount of damage was similar to the other year when it went to -3. So my learning is that any level of frost is very bad news. However, because we hadn’t got round to trimming and tying up, we still managed to keep some extra buds and mitigate the frost to some extent. We then had the scorching summer which helped the secondary buds and bunches develop and ripen enough. Therefore we had a reduced crop again but we did very well in terms of ripeness. Global warming is a really mixed bag – the likelihood of spring frosts is much higher and is certainly affecting our yields, but on the other side the hot summers are pushing ripeness in what is otherwise a marginal climate. We also had quite a lot of sunburn damage in the bacchus.
In the summer we had the great news that our Bacchus 2021 vintage had received a silver medal at the Wine GB Awards. Only two bacchus’s in the county made a gold so it might be a bit optimistic hoping we can keep progressing to get one of those. This November, we went to the Vineyard show – they’d picked our wine and 50 other still wines as the best in the country and it was great having the opportunity to try lots of other English wines.
One of my biggest aims for the business has been to get us fully skilled and competent in all vineyard related jobs and its been a long slow learning process. A really significant achievement was me getting a spray licence last winter and it put us in a totally different position this summer / going forward. If we can spray then we don’t have to worry about getting contractors in on time to stop disease taking off. A friendly local farmer let me do the test on his machinery which was distinctly nerve wracking.
This year, whilst I’ve done what I could do, a lot more of the work fell on Ryan due to how physical the work is. We also can’t thank Sandy enough – he’s our local hero who regularly volunteers and who annually strims the vineyard amongst plenty of other things. Harvest came around and despite the frost we managed to get enough good grapes to make another bacchus and schonburger for next year. Harvest was bigger than ever in terms of numbers of volunteers and the sun shone again. Reuben mostly slept through the whole thing on a giant bean bag.
So we’re now already at Christmas. Sadly we’ve come to the end of our 2016 sparkling wine – there’s just a few cases left and likely to go at the next market. There will be quite a gap before the next batch we picked last year comes through. We’re looking forward with lots of positivity - onwards and upwards for the coming year. We’ve got lots of ideas for what is next and excited to have Reuben on all our future adventures.