When you operate your vineyard ‘at the margins’, code for in an environment of little to no hope of your grapes ripening, it pays to hang on to every positive you can possibly dredge up. Which is why I saved the article from the Sunday papers a couple of weeks ago about small vineyards headlined Small Wonders. The author, David Williams, wrote that, “if I put together a list of the most exciting wines I’ve tried in the past year, an overwhelming majority would be the work of producers with just a handful of hectares.” Or about a quarter of a hectare in our case. Anyway, I reckon we qualify on the ‘small’ front. I’m not quite sure about exciting but unusual would certainly figure by the time I’d finished with the blending. We have or rather had just short of 500 vines (more of which later) and last year but one, we made about 40 bottles of wine*. This was the year that the bloody birds ate 75% of the crop and the Solaris didn’t produce any grapes at all that year, so you could argue that 40 odd bottles was pretty good but the fact that I am trying to make a case for this being a good result does demonstrate just how marginal we are.
We might be marginal and we might be small but there is still plenty of stuff to be getting on with until the real hard work begins. One of the small frustrations of any vineyard I imagine, large or small, is your wires going saggy. This is what is happening to a number of our rows and the result is very displeasing particularly to somebody with my OCD tendencies. I have to say anybody with OCD inclinations should not set up a vineyard where we have, tidiness is not a by-word but then I’ve already written about why we did it where we did. I.e. we already had the land rather than we bought the land to specifically to set up a vineyard. I digress. The sagginess enabled me to indulge in buying a new toy (see above) and I love to buy new toys and this one has the cache of being almost unique. Grown men with a history of buying man tools have no idea, when I show them the toy, what it is for. This makes me happy. If you look at the photo above you can ask yourself, do I know what this is or what it does?
Let me tell you that the place where I bought it, other than knowing that they had one, had no idea how it worked. Neither the very nice lady who sold it to me when I showed up at her hut / shipping container, nor the proper Yorkshire chap who worked with her had any idea how it worked or even what it did. She carefully showed me how to use it, where the gripple fitted – I’ll come back to the gripple in a moment – complete bullshit, it didn’t fit where she said it did at all. No, it doesn’t tension she said. I showed her the little leaflet that came with it – – but it says here that it’s a / tensioner and oh look here’s a diagram of the gripple and where it fits. No, it wasn’t where you said. I paid £130 for the grippler and a packet of 20 gripples. The grippples cost £1.40 or something each. You wouldn’t want to screw up and waste a couple by inserting it where the lady said it went. I paid my money and left. Now all I have to do is use the thing.
At a more prosaic level I’ve also ordered another 25 Madeline Angevine vines to replace the ones we’ve lost over the years. I’ve also had a go at taking cuttings of the vines which Youtube says is an easy thing to do. They put theirs in pots but as this is Yorkshire, after careful trimming like the videos show, I’ve just stuck them in the ground. Nothing fancy here. We will see if they grow or, more likely, if the wabbits eat them. Very exciting. Actually it’s all very exciting at this time of year wondering if the buds are going to appear (and who could blame for refusing to show with the weather we’re having up in the dale) and if they do whether a late frost, like last year, will freeze those buds into oblivion.
Meanwhile, as we are members of the UKVA (United Kingdom Vineyard Association) we get our regular magazine imaginatively called The Grapevine. The membership is great value and the magazine is always such a fun read. The last issue had articles about the outright useful – applying organic matter to your vines; using social media to promote your wine (maybe not yet for us); the obscure – Ontario’s first wine in a can; cold, hardy grapes, – could be very useful when I get round to reading it; growing vines under plastic for vineyards at the margins (maybe, but I think covering ours in plastic would be a) expensive and b) ruin a great view and finally the scary, trunk disease, all I’ve read about this is that it kills your vines and is more likely to happen when vines are under stress, if ever vines were under stress, it ours. So all good stuff and just the thing to be reading at these somewhat quieter times of year although, as I’ve suggested, quietness is a relative term in the vineyard ‘business’.
*I wrote a while ago about taking a couple of bottles of our wine along to a meeting of our fellow viticulturists in Yorkshire to compare ours with theirs but then bottled it if you will pardon the pun and left our bottles in the car. Since that time we have shared a bottle or two within the family but never with ‘outsiders’, until this week when we took a bottle (and a bottle of Prosecco just in case) when we went along to some friends for dinner. I wouldn’t say that either of them are wine connoisseurs (and I told him so only less politely) which is perhaps why I felt I could risk it trying it out on them. We had had a bottle of the same blend a couple of weeks before and thought it ‘decent’. Anyway to cut a short story even shorter they loved it, my pal said I should be ‘proud’ and he’s not that kind of Yorkshire man really (i.e. he doesn’t give out compliments readily, indeed aat all) and this made a retired man very happy.
PS First buds appear end of mid April