Some kind of milestone, 60 vineyard blogs, that makes over 60,000 words. Not bad for the perhaps still most Northerly vineyard in England, planted as an experiment and as a retirement activity about 7 years ago. Not bad at all. And it’s still all happening even as we speak. I really must make it into a book.
You’ve only to look at the photo above to get an idea of how well the vines are doing. This after a very moderate May and June weather-wise. Very different to last year. Of course there’s a long way to go before we get any grapes.
The next big event in the vineyard will be budburst. We have the buds, now they need to turn into flowers and hence into grapes followed, we hope, by wine. Sounds simple enough. Last year it was, thanks to the weather. But that’s last year. As we know the past is a foreign country, they do things different there (J.P. Hartley).
Before that we have some decisions to make about de-budding and de-suckering. I still can’t easily bring myself to pulling off healthy looking shoots. Not in my Yorkshire nature. But as every gardener knows, you have to be cruel to be kind. Or make sure that all the growth / energy of the plant goes into the grapes, not the leaves. We’ve been putting this task off, maybe this weekend we’ll make a start.
Talking of the past, we’re still waiting for our last year’s red wine to be ready to collect. Not sure what we’re going to do with it when we get it. The white is going down well but we haven’t re-tasted the red since we asked out wine-maker to add some RCGM (sugar to you and me), to make it a little more palatable. But maybe 600 bottles, that’s a lot.
And talking of tinkering with the red, which we have in a number of ways, including serving it chilled. A suggestion made by our neighbour Nick, the gamekeeper who helped us pick our grapes last year. I’ll come back to him in a moment. But to finish the tinkering focus I’ve been as you know from the last blog trying to buy some oak barrels, in Ireland and in the UK, no luck so I turned to a patented device called oak spirals. They seemed like they might be the answer. Something like oak shavings I suppose.
Unfortunately the patent for these spirals (apparently drilled out of the trunk of the tree although I’m not quite sure how this works) resides with an American company and they have proved quite hard to deal with, to the point when I lost the will to live re-oaking the wine.
So at this point it looks unlikely that we’ll be trying to give that oaky flavour to our red wine. I said I’d return to Nick and now I will. He called me yesterday and informed me he was putting in his posts, asking me a few questions about the spacings in our vineyard. I was happy to give him the benefit of my experience although I suspect my plantings were a little too close for the classic vineyard. I did it deliberately to see if this closer planting would ameliorate (nice word) the effect of the wind. Of course you have to be careful that you don’t ameliorate (so nice I’ll use it again) the effect of the sun by close planting.
Interestingly he’d planted in the same configuration (North – South) as we have. My Aussie chum told me I’d planted them the wrong way. They should he told me be up and down the slope (East – West) rather than across the slope. But Nick has an uncle in Switzerland who owns vineyards and produces quite a lot of wine for commercial purposes. So he knows what of he speaks and he said North – South was the orientation. A lot of big words in this blog.
When he told me he had started his vineyard, just the other side of the dale, I was delighted. Not a case of misery loving company but real pleasure at having a neighbour who shared my enthusiasm. Who knows the dale could become the Cotes de Rhone of Yorkshire. It’s already been nicknamed something similar after the Tour de France was located here. Right past the vineyard on one occasion, although that was the Tour de Yorkshire not France.
Anyway I’m digressing. And while I am, just let me mention the second summerhouse again. If we follow the example of quite a few of the vineyards we’ve visited we should be thinking of the vineyard as a wedding venue. True the summerhouse wouldn’t hold a big crowd (about 4 people maximum) but if the land were a little flatter there’s plenty of room for a marquee or two. Got to cover costs somehow.
I’ve already written about the difficulties of setting up to sell our wine, all the red tape and such like. Seems like we’re not the only ones. An item on the chat-line of the WineGB organisation of which we are members, one of the members was asking for advice about a one-off payment to them by their local pub. They weren’t licensed or registered for AWRS (forgotten what that is) and thought (like we did) that it looked like a lot of trouble to get legal and was there any way they could be legal but work around the legalities? Short answer – no. Not just us then.
So let that be a warning to any of you out there that think planting your own vineyard and making your own wine might be a bit of a way of making a few extra quid. Don’t bother. If on the other hand you like a challenge and are fascinated by the endless ways in which nature and one’s own incompetence can keep you awake in the middle of the night, then planting a vineyard in your retirement might just be the missing link for you.
Just to show it can be enjoyable I’ll finish with some photos of the vineyard looking as neat as it has ever done, thanks to my neighbour. Oh, and one of the new summerhouse as a bonus.
