This morning, after our election results, I thought I’d leave that topic alone, at least until a more mature reflection blog later and provide an end of year summary about our vineyard in 2019. Be warned it’s not a pretty story. It is not one of those cosy-couple-plant vineyard in the wild north and against all odds makes great wine, type stories. But it is as it is, as they say.
This is the short version, and that’s about all I’m going to write this Friday morning. It’s short not because nothing has happened, things are always happening in the world of vineyards, it’s because I’ve had a very hectic week one way or another and I just haven’t had time to write a Friday blog until now, which is, well, Friday morning.
The short version, as you know if you’ve been reading this section of my retirement blog, is we haven’t picked any grapes and haven’t made any wine. How could you make wine, you say if you haven’t picked any grapes? Well, we could have bought some in, there’s plenty for sale if you’re prepared to go fetch them from the Southern lands where, as we know, the sun always shines and the grapes grow and get made into increasingly fashionable wine. Bitter, moi? Surely not.
I actually have no idea how other vineyards have faired in this less auspicious year. Vineyards seem very cagey about their results. Commercial advantage and all that. So while it would be nice to know that others have had a difficult year, we don’t have that comfort. If I had attended a recent meeting of our Northerly vineyards I would obviously have got more information (I could hardly have less) but I took the cowardly way out and stayed at home. The last things we need are a) mickey taking or worse b) sympathy. Already had a bit of that and it was entirely well-meant.
Our main enemies, and this is going to sound like the Spanish Inquisition sketch from Monty Python, our main enemies have been 1. Grey Rot, which wiped out the Rondo, 2. the birds, which wiped out what was left of the Solaris and 3. our own stupidity, which failed to predict either of the above and take action to prevent.
As somebody wiser than I once said, when you’re making wine at the margins you can’t afford to make mistakes. Ha, I say, I spit on your margins, I see your mistakes and raise you. Although I have to say, on balance, if we’re not going to have any grapes, I’d rather it be as a result of our own mistakes than mysterious happenings about which we know nothing.
At least this way it should be just about possible to learn from our mistakes, although it takes a year or more to show that we have indeed learned anything. We’ve taken on board an agronomist for next year and our neighbour across the dale is shortly to plant his 1,000 vines with help and advice from his family in Switzerland who, contrary to my knowledge about that country, have big commercial vineyards. So one way or another we shouldn’t be short of advice for next year.
We’re also seriously working on improving the effectiveness of our willow windbreaks. Or rather our man down the dale is. He’s laying them down I think it’s called. In a future blog I’ll provide photographic evidence of this process, now he’s got into it, it looks very impressive – and neat and who knows might actually help protect the vines. They need all the help they can get in the wind area.
We also plan to take our pruning more seriously, we’ve been pretty lackadaisical recently. I’m hoping to go on a refresher winter-pruning course shortly, to relearn everything I’ve forgotten since the last winter-pruning course I attended. We probably need to burn all the cuttings that are probably infected by grey rot.
We’ve sprayed our grass to a) help new vines establish and b) reduce to the chances of frost lingering in the vineyard throughout this coming winter. So just trying to be a bit more professional all round.
On the grounds that optimism springs eternal every new year in the vineyard, I’ve ordered another 50 Madeline Angevine and their tubes. With the 100 we planted this year, that should, assuming the grey rot hasn’t killed them (the new ones), have about 600 vines in total. That’s quite enough to make the amount of wine we want, in a good year that is.
Also on the optimism front, my vineyard-planting neighbour and I are planning on buying some basic equipment in the next few months to locate in his barns and then we will have a go at making the wine ourselves but that’s a way off. It does show that my enthusiasm for this vineyard owning business isn’t killed off though. As I’ve said elsewhere at least this year we haven’t had to worry about how we’re going to get any wine made.
As a final attempt at a positive, we were up at the vineyard this week meeting with my neighbour who was giving us some feedback about what he had learned from his visit to his uncle’s in Switzerland recently. We met him at our barn and as we arrived on site I couldn’t help but notice how neat and tidy the vineyard looked. True, one or two tubes had blown off in recent gales, which means, in turn, the opportunity for a chomp by our local rabbits but on the whole the place looked great.
Unfortunately I didn’t have time to take any photos when we were there because then I could do a ‘before and after’ feature. If you compare photos of the vineyard as it was when first planted and looked at it now (rough pasture field against a, now, well-mown and tended vineyard), I think you’d be impressed with what it looks like (even if it doesn’t actually produce grapes). I will do just this in a future blog but for now I’m going to concentrate on drinking wine rather than trying to make it. There’s plenty of red left in the garage but that’s another story. Cheers.