I wrote in my last vineyard blog that there had been plenty going off in the vineyard world. And things have been no different in the last four weeks. For example, last Wednesday we decided to give ourselves a treat and went into Leeds for lunch and throughout the day a lot happened related to the vineyard.
Before we set off I tried to read another report from ‘our’ agronomist. Hard going particularly the articles about trunk disease and then all the readings from the leaf analysis. That was the start of the day.
As we sat enjoying our lunch a couple of hours later I got several phone calls from the pipeline company whose gas pipeline runs smack through our vineyard. They were informing me we should not have planted willows as our windbreak directly over the pipeline because the roots could damage the pipe.
I have to say they’ve taken their own sweet time about informing us given they fly over and walk the pipeline on a regular basis. As I pointed out the willows have been there about six years. You might be tempted to say well they’ve probably got bigger but in fact they haven’t because we keep them well chopped back. I suppose that doesn’t stop the roots from growing. Anyway we shall see just how much of the windbreak they want to remove. That was part two of the day.
Then at the end of the same day I got a phone call from my gamekeeper chum, he who has followed in my footsteps and planted a thousand vines of his own on the opposite side of the dale. I’ve been waiting to hear from him about whether he wants to team up and buy some equipment and make out own wine. There was no urgency for his decision because my grapes were a long way from being ripe.
But over the last 4 weeks the situation has changed somewhat. We’ve got more grapes than I thought and they are starting to grow and ripen. I don’t want to get ahead of myself a lot could go wrong in the next few weeks before they are actually ready to harvest but, as perhaps you can see from the photos (above and below), things are looking up. The amount of Rondo on the vines is a particular surprise. I’d pretty much decided to give them up to the trunk disease but they seem to want to prove me wrong. You’ll see why this might be significant later in this blog.
Anyway to cut part of this long story short, my gamekeeper chum doesn’t feel ready to invest in wine-making equipment just yet. Which is fair enough because his vines are only in their second year and it will be a wee while before he’s ready to make any wine from his own grapes.
So still not wanting to tempt fate, but now realising that I might have to start thinking about what I could do with a proper amount of grapes, my thoughts turned to Jon at Ryedale Vines (where we buy our new vines from). He had some time ago offered to do something with our grapes should we ever get any. At that time it seemed highly unlikely that this was going to be a bridge we needed to cross. But here we were, not on the bridge but close by.
So last weekend I called him and, on Nick (the gamekeeper’s) recommendation, asked him about a sparkling wine he was having made for his vineyard and here’s the thing, it is a blend of Rondo and Solaris the very two vines we have most of. It’s a sparkling rose and Nick had bought a bottle and fell in love with. So on his last visit to our vineyard seeing what we had on our vines suggested we might consider having some made.
I thought it a nice idea but of course it would cost me £4 or £5 a bottle to have it made. And the main point is we have no way of selling it because we do not have the right licence or whatever. We looked into it before and it seemed incredibly complicated to get one. So talking to Jon I asked do you have a bottle we could try just in case we could be as impressed as Nick?
No he hadn’t, he’d completely sold out and at just under £30 a bottle that made for good business for him. When I expressed my concerns about spending money on the production of our own version he asked me how many bottles I thought we might have.
I could only roughly compare this crop to our last successful harvest in 2018 and said maybe 500 bottles (it might easily be none of course in which case we wouldn’t need to worry about spending any money). I said well we can’t sell it so we’d have to give it away like we did last time we had wine.
Then he said, maybe we should get a licence to sell because 500 bottles at £30 a bottle would work out at £15,000. Now that gave me pause for thought. So I asked him if he would (for a fee) do the legwork and obtain the licence we needed. He said he would. Hmm, the £ signs began to whirr in front of my eyes. But then I thought don’t be so bloody silly, you’re getting ahead of yourself big time.
So since then we’ve been spraying and de-leafing with increased enthusiasm as you might imagine but trying not to get too over-confident of a positive outcome. As I say a lot could go wrong between now and harvest and, as they say, if it can go wrong then it probably will. But by the time I write my next vineyard blog I’ll probably be a lot clearer about whether we might actually make any money out of the vineyard instead of the more normal process of putting money in.
