We possibly thought owning a vineyard, albeit a small one, would be more fun than this. Although knowing my usual scepticism about my projects, probably not. If we wanted a reminder of the tedious side of vineyard life I wouldn’t need to look for ‘inspiration’ to the weather side of things – too hot a week ago which brings out the buds too early, to be followed by too cold. It’s not been cold as in freezing cold which would be the worst combination for new buds then killed off by the frost. No, not that but the kind of cold and now wet, but rather weather that makes working in the vineyard – pruning and fertilising for example – a real chore rather than any kind of pleasure.
We’re trying to prune all the vines this year. This in spite of the fact that we got far more grapes from the unpruned vines last year than the section we did prune. They’ll lose their vigour if not pruned, cautioned our more knowledgeable friends. It’s not so much the pruning itself, which Mrs Summerhouse mostly takes care of, but picking up and stacking the off-cuts, that’s the pain.
I probably can’t ask ‘our man who does for us’ to pick up the bits because he’s got his hands full replacing all the stakes and wires that stick out at the end of each row with their on-going threat of garrotting the dogs when they race round like lunatics (or dog equivalent), with a more accessible support structure. Looks much neater as well. It’s amazing how many ways there are of spending money on even a small vineyard. And to think I occasionally think of increasing its size. Ha.
And that’s a double ‘ha’ when you get into the area of making and disposing of what will probably be 600 bottles of wine. You’d think this at least would be the fun part of the enterprise. But no. I’m not sure where to start with this. I have written in previous blogs that we had a couple of pubs and a wine shop interested in selling our wine. Which is nice, except this is where the lack of fun I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, comes in. Take a look at the image above to get a flavour of the less fun side of things.
We were advised by our wine-makers to make sure we did everything legally. Fair enough I don’t want HMRC spying on us with their drones or even helicopters. So we contacted them. Not by phone – too difficult – but by chat-line which worked very well. After probably an hour’s ‘chat’ I felt a slight chink of ‘this isn’t fun’, a chill wind of doom creeping into my soul. The woman was perfectly helpful but that old phrase beloved of one of my ex-bosses began to circle my brain – it’s not as simple as that.
To cut a long story relatively short, she arranged for one of her colleagues to call us – Mrs SH in fact – a couple of days later. We happened to be in our Burnsall hotel which didn’t help because once again the phone call went on for over an hour. We thought all we wanted to know was – how do we get a licence to sell wine and tell us about paying tax and duty on the wine?
Oh dearie me, no, it wasn’t that simple. Lee, the chap on the phone was again very helpful and raised all kinds of issues we hadn’t even begun to think of. Mrs SH made notes as they went along and Lee said he would record everything he’d said and send us a copy of the conversation in an email. He did. His email was (and we counted them) 133 lines long. It covered a lot about setting up a small business which we didn’t think we wanted to do. So we could ignore much, though not all, of that side of things.
It covered registering (which I tried to do on line and fell at the first hurdle so to speak). This took me again best part of an hour and ended with me not having details of my tax situation. I switched to labelling, that would be easier? No, what needs to go on the label needs to be seen to be believed. One small example – allergens and as a sub, sub heading – sulphites. You can’t write sulphite-free because even if you haven’t added any sulphites the process of making the wine will generate more than the 10% that is legally allowed for a maker to be able to put ‘sulphite-free’ on the label. And so it went on, a different little challenge with each of the 133 lines and website addresses Lee had provided. Then there was having a hygiene certificate to sell food and drink, a public-liability licence, change car insurance, health and safety and on and this before we’d even got to the tax and duty stuff. You get the idea.
So, as I say, long story short, we decided it simply wasn’t worth the effort. It’s not as if we were expecting to be able to retire on the proceeds oh, I forgot, we are retired. And, unless things change drastically, we don’t need the money, so why the heck bother? So we’re not going to sell the wine, whether we can give it away so folks in the local pubs and shop can at least taste it remains to be seen. I’m sure there will be some law against this as well.
All this and not a word so far about the wine itself. After our visit to the wine-maker the result was – white wine tasted great to us. The red needs more work. We need to add some RCGM (basically a concentrates sugar solution) and we’re going to try and buy at least one oak (or maybe chestnut) barrel when we’re in Ireland and put a portion of the wine in that for a while. More of this in a later blog no doubt. As it stands our plan is as follows – for the red, sell 150 litres back to the wine-maker; put 100 litres into boxes; bottle 40 litres (60 bottles) as rose and put 110 litres into an oak / chestnut barrel. The white (as is) – 40 litres into boxes and 30 litres in bottles.
PS I’ve ordered 100 blank labels, they arrive today possibly. We’ll see what we can do with those. Our own label might be fun?