The big day/s in the vineyard year. The 16th and 17th of October, the days we picked the grapes. So a great relief to have all safely gathered in but not as many gathered in as I had hoped. When we arrived at Ryedale Vineyard, where we’re having the wine made, I admit I was disappointed to find, by Jon’s (the wine maker) estimate, based on his weighing of the grapes, that we were only going to make less than 90 bottles.
I suppose I should be pleased that we got any Rondo (first picture below) at all given the trunk disease saga but, that said, there wasn’t enough to make a separate red. So combining the two, the Rondo and the Solaris (second picture below)to make a rose, seemed the only sensible option. Hence the 90 bottles. Incidentally it turned out I’d arranged for too many pickers on account of me being over-optimistic about how many grapes we had.
At the wine-makers, it seems that, despite advice to the contrary (from Nick), it will be possible to make the rose right from the start rather than blending the two varieties at a later stage. Furthermore, that we can make a form of sparkling wine without the need to send it away. Jon had bottles there to view that he had made using his own equipment but I only looked at them not tasted them, so I will have to wait for several months before I know what I’ve signed up for. But at about £3 a bottle (without the cost of labelling), it’s not too expensive. About £300 for the whole lot.
Certainly with this small quantity it isn’t worth our while getting a licence to sell it as was once a dream of ours. Or a nightmare if you take Mrs Summerhouse’s view of this strategy. So that’s one decision made for us. I can’t say I’m unhappy about having this decision taken out of our hands.
So no photo of our grapes, no posing as proud Yorkshire grape growers this year as we did in 2018. Just the one above taken by my daughter. I knew we would get considerably less wine this year than in that great year of 2018 but I hadn’t fully realised just how much less. So at his point, in round figures in 2018, I think we made the equivalent of 600 bottles (they didn’t get any further than 10 litre plastic ‘bladders’ in cardboard boxes, set against the 90 this year. Quite a difference.
Of course some people would say and in fact already have, that we’ve done well to make any wine at all. Many English vineyards have had poor years mainly as a result of late frosts and then mildew throughout the year as a result of the warm then wet weather we had. Strangely Yorkshire has suffered less with the mildew than the usually more favoured Southern vineyards. You see I always knew that our Yorkshire wind would come in handy.
I’ve given you as much information about the making of our wine as I can remember but I have to confess by the time we got there I was knackered. After two days of picking I then had to drive a temperamental van from Nidderdale over to Ryedale. The van does not like hills so my son-in-law organised with his phone sat nav for us to drive up probably the steepest hill in Yorkshire – Sutton Bank. That was quite tension-producing. By the time I got back to Leeds it was four o’clock on a day that started at 6.30, and I’d driven for about 4 hours as well as the actual picking on that day and the day before.
So perhaps I can be forgiven for paying less than full attention to what Jon was saying about what he intended to do with our grapes. To be honest I just felt like saying here you take them and do what the bloody hell you want with them. I’ve given as much as I can to their development. And it did cross my mind that we had put an awful lot of effort into producing such a small amount of wine.
But that is not a good mind-set for somebody who is running a vineyard in the Yorkshire Dales and calling it an experimental vineyard into the bargain. And with the best will in the world I couldn’t honestly say that our investment this year – agronomist, sprays, maintenance, grass-cutting etc. etc. – constituted any kind of bargain. But then compared with the last two years when we got absolutely nothing, I suppose you might make a case for a bargain of some kind.
Anyway, I guess we can relax a little now until the winter pruning tasks come along. We’ve had weeks of balancing the de-leafing, feeding the vines, spraying for mould, measuring sugars and acids, watching the Solaris get over-ripe and the Rondo still not ripe enough to pick and hoping that the grapes are ready to pick roughly the same time as the dates I had arranged with our wine-maker necessarily some time ago (to fit in with his schedule).
So yes, it’s been a stressful few weeks (months even) and I have to stop myself from asking, was it all worth it? All that stress for 90 bottles. But no, stop, that kind of thinking. It could have been a lot worse. How’s that for an optimistic summary of 2021 in the vineyard?