I have to say this right up front, if you’re the kind of person who likes to be in control of his or her retirement life, maybe having your own vineyard is not the retirement activity for you. Unless you pay somebody to make the decisions / do the work for you. We do pay ‘our man’ to do a lot of the work in the vineyard but, until this last week, we’d never given him anything actual vine-related to do. I’ll come back to this.
While there is a simple truth to the above, it’s also true that, inevitably, it’s not, in the words of my old boss, as simple as that. What’s not simple is that we’re not the most organised couple in the world and certainly not in the world of owning your own vineyard.
If we kept better records (which I realised, looking back, is what we used to do) of what has occurred in past years in the vineyard then maybe we wouldn’t continually be taken by surprise by what happens now. I will give you one example. Two years ago because we were lazy we didn’t prune the whole of the vineyard. At this distance in time we reckon we pruned about a third. But not keeping clear records means we’re not sure which vines were pruned / unpruned.
Friends who knew more about gardening than we do said aha, you’ll lose vigour in your vines. Well maybe but then last year’s harvest came along. If you remember that far back you will remember the weather was exceptional. But the point was, at least as far as we were concerned, the unpruned ones provided us with far more grapes than the pruned ones. So plant that in your knowledge bank we said to our ‘know-all’ friends.
I won’t say we were smug, gosh no. But there was a slight element of maybe we know more than you. Until now. This year the vines we’d left unpruned two years ago have given us hardly any grapes whereas the top third of the vineyard (the pruned third) have provided as big a crop at this stage, and it’s still early days for grapes in this part of the world, as last year’s bumper harvest.
Of course the above explanation is only a pathetic attempt to wrest back some of the control we frequently feel we lack in vineyard terms. Oh yes, we know why that’s happening, it’s because … This makes us knowledgeable vineyard owners with six or seven year’s experience, learning a little bit more each year, not the bumbling amateurs we undoubtedly are.
And this, so far, is only a part of my frustration with what’s happening in our vineyard. Hard to believe but true. I said at the beginning of this blog that we had given our man a vine-related job to do. With the advice of our wine-makers ringing in my ears – we fertilise our vines every two weeks – I decided to ask him to spray the vines while we were away hacking through the jungle, laughingly known as the garden, at the Derbyshire cottage.
We have two identical backpack sprayers. One for weed-killing and the other for fertiliser. On the back of one I have written, in now-faded felt tip – insecticide, nothing on the other. When we left I put the unmarked sprayer and the fertiliser itself outside for our man to use. I also suggested that he try just a couple of rows to see what happened. What could go wrong?
When we arrived back at the vineyard after a two week absence, the answer seemed to be, quite a lot. The tips of all the vines were curling up and the vines as a whole looked very unhealthy. Our man was away for the Bank Holiday weekend so I could not ask him what he’d done. And, as I considered the scene, I realised that even if he had been here I would not have been able to enquire because this might imply that I blamed him (if there’s any fault in this it is mine, not his) for what might yet turn out to be a disaster of biblical proportions.
And in case you think I exaggerate, the worst case scenario here is that somehow the whole of the vineyard might be wiped out. Extreme, true, but we will have to wait to see the result and, as my late mother always said, always think the worst then you can only be pleasantly surprised (or confirmed as a miserable but accurate, old bugger).
So I go over and over, and over what I did. Is there any chance I left out the wrong sprayer? Is what appears to be fertiliser actually something less benign? Did my vague instructions about the strength of the fertiliser mean the mixture was too strong? Did he use the fertiliser but sprayed it when the sun was directly on the vines (not a good idea). But most of all what were we to do now?
Could the grapes / this year’s crop be saved? We decided to chop off all the wilted ends of the vines and so, if they have been poisoned, stop the poison from spreading through and down to the roots. This is what we have spent the last two days doing, nervously looking at the vines to see if the wilting had been arrested. Our observations have not been helped by the hottest Bank Holiday – ever. Could it be the heat that was now causing the wilting?
To say my head was spinning would be a massive understatement. We could be chopping off the very leaves that were supposed to begin fertilising the vine. You might call this a delicious irony or you might call it a massive cock-up. Who the hell knows?
The uncertainty multiplies. We decided while we were chopping away to de-leave the area around the fledgling grapes. This a technique we have tried before. It exposes the grapes to more sunlight and that surely is a good thing. Yes, unless you remove too many leaves and reduce the photosynthesis / growth of the vine, which would be counter-productive.
But can anybody tell us what percentage of leaves to remove? No, it seems not, so once again we’re spinning out of control. We can only wait probably for several weeks and see what effect our actions have had. I will keep you informed and if you’re reading this blog for the first time courtesy of my advert in The Oldie magazine, I can only suggest you read back through this section of my blog and see if you can discover happy times. They’re there somewhere.