A retirement blog about the vineyard. My Facebook manager / friend suggests I should repeat some of the early vineyard blogs. Bearing in mind there are 57, now 58, blogs in this series, that gives me plenty of choice and yet I’m uneasy with this strategy. I’m not sure why exactly. What do you think about his idea, after all if you’re interested in the beginnings of this crazy venture you only have to go back to the archives. Maybe he thinks you’re not capable of rising to that challenge? It’s certainly not as if there is nothing happening in our vineyard lives and I need to revisit the past. No siree. There’s a whole lot going off.
In the vineyard itself there’s the usual winter pruning – we or rather Mrs Summerhouse, has pruned all 500 (approx.) this year, so that’s different to last year. Then we pruned about one third and, you might remember, the unpruned ones gave us far more grapes than the pruned ones. Despite this and maybe with a slightly cynical, do we really want that many grapes again, we’ve pruned everything that’s still standing.
I’ve winter-fertilised all the vines and even bought different fertilisers (chicken pellets and fish blood – or ‘chicken bones’ as the nice lady at Homebase described one of them, she got confused she said, she knew it was chicken something) to get the new vines off to a good start. That will be this weekend’s task, planting the 100 new Madeline Angevine vines that I have to pick up this very day, if all goes well.
My gamekeeper chum and I are driving over to Ryedale to pick up the vines. I could have had them delivered and saved my self the trouble of a three hour drive. But my gamekeeper pal wanted to see the place, as he was thinking of investing in vines of his own. His help at harvest time last year was invaluable hence me wanting to return the favour with a, somewhat inconvenient, for me, trip to the supplier. Fairly typical of the way our lives have been of late – if it can be complicated it will be.
So hopefully pick them up Friday, back to the vineyard, stand them in water overnight and plant next day – right? Well not quite. I have to go back to Leeds on Saturday morning for a doctor’s appointment about my diabetes (which could be tricky) which I better not miss. Then return and plant vines either late Saturday or Sunday. Don’t think an extra day in the bucket will harm the new vines.
In the meantime, my man who helps in the vineyard will, if all goes according to plan, have dug the 100 holes ready for the new vines. I believe he enjoys this kind of physical labour (unlike me) and my payments to him, for a variety of jobs, help supplement his pension. At least I hope that’s how it works for him. I offered to hire him a petrol-driven augur like the one I used when I planted the previous 400 vines. He said he preferred the spade and at least I had a nice hole-digging spade he can use. It’s a beautiful object and I haven’t exactly worn it out since I bought it a couple of years ago. In fact I might go as far as to say, it’s untouched.
I started writing this blog on Tuesday because I’m going to be pushed for time the rest of the week. Which means I cannot, at this point, write about our trip to the wine-maker. This will be our first attempt at putting the white wine into ‘bag in a box’ containers. I’m hoping to be able to provide photographic evidence of this part of the process. Then there will be the question of what to do with approximately 50 litres of white wine (a lot more when the red comes on stream – is that what wine does?)
For now I will be visiting our two local pubs in the Dales and seeing if they are interested in providing free tasting for local customers. We can’t sell it to them and I assume they can’t sell it to their customers, hence the free aspect of this part of the process. I wrote about the complexities (that word again) of setting up to sell wine. Hence the giving-it-away plan. We will see how this cunning plan works out.
Well you might call Wednesday (yesterday) a red-letter day except it was white rather than red, wine that is. Was it an historic day? In a sense it was, we brought home 50 litres and 15 and a half bottles of the Solaris wine from the wine-makers. It didn’t take too long – about an hour and a half to transfer the wine from the barrel into boxes and bottles.
Just a matter of filling large jugs and pouring it through a funnel into the plastic bag inside the box. See photos above and below. True 10 litres of wine in a plastic bag is remarkably heavy and unwieldy especially to manoeuvre the bag inside the box if you’ve got it in the wrong configuration, vis a vis ‘tap’ on bag relative to hole in cardboard box but we only found that out when we got home and tried to set up the box ready for drinking. Live and learn.
So not very hard work but we were knackered nonetheless. The wine, other than the one box we took out last night to sample, remains in the van. We were happy to drink it, just not to move it – again. But it did taste great, Mrs Summerhouse compared it to a Chenin Blanc, get her, not bad for a girl from a council estate.
So all good but only another step along the way. We have to talk to landlords of local pubs to see if they wish to give it away. They might think it will reduce their profits – if people get free wine why would they bother paying for it? I don’t know we’ve never done this before. And then of course there’s 400 litres of the red to deal with. That’s yet to come. Interesting times in our retirement.
