When the tasks in the vineyard start to slow down at this time of year it’s inevitable that our thoughts turn farther afield to other people’s efforts. For example –
Scrolling through my FB pages I came across this advert from ‘Quinta does Vales and the wine-making experience’. It’s a vineyard in Portugal I believe. The advert says,
Making your own wine may sound like a fantasy dream to many wine lovers. But not to us
Make your own wine / buy a vineyard. You are free to make all the decisions along the way: from choosing and planting the grape varieties to growing your own grapes from blending and aging the wine to bottling it and designing your own label
Instead of spending millions on buying a vineyard you can now make your very own wine without the usual logistics headaches that come with wine production and all for a fraction of the price.
Read a little more and you find out that, you pay 30K to 60K euros and you get to make 288 bottles or 225 litres (a barrel) from 600sqm. Which coincidentally is about the same size as our North Yorkshire vineyard. They certainly market the idea very well but it does seem quite expensive.
I suppose as my own modest grape-growing / wine-making enterprise rolls along or at least I think it does, it was last seen on October 17th and I wrote about it on 22nd of same month. This enterprise made me pause for thought. First on the ‘why do I bother when it could all be so simple’, front. Second of course are the comparative costs.
The land itself cost us nothing in the sense that it came with the barn which was what we really wanted at that time. And in the intervening years since we planted the vines, 2012 I believe, we have spent relatively little on developing our vineyard apart from the cost of buying the vines, posts, wire etc.
In fact in 2018 the weather was so good that we ended up making about 600 bottles (equivalent, it went into plastic ‘bladders’ /boxes and some of it still remains there) and we spent next to nothing on the vineyard. You just plant and every few years you get a great year and you’ve learned how to keep the bloody birds and rabbits etc etc from eating the grapes, and hey presto, free wine.
But this year we’ve spent some serious money primarily because we’ve hired an agronomist who naturally charges us for his visits and he makes recommendations about chemicals and fertilisers and the like and these all cost money. So yes this year maybe a couple of thousand just to get to the point on being able to make, so we’re told, less than 100 bottles. Hmm.
And then there’s the cost of making the wine – about £3 a bottle for still, and, if I’ve understood his breakdown of costs figures correctly, £9 a bottle for sparkling. A crude comparison (and I may have got my maths wrong) suggests that,, in the case of the Quina dos Vales example, (above) you’re paying say 30,000 euros for 300 (roughly) bottles which works out at £100 a bottle for the first year but obviously reduces until after 10 years each bottle is costing about £10.
So a somewhat shabby attempt to make my costs seem somewhat more acceptable. And that’s not allowing for all the fun (sometimes) we have along the way and the support we give to the local community well one of them employing him to do maintenance work on the vineyard when we’re not there, which is mostly.
Anyway that will do as a summary of this year so far. Next the always tricky decision about pruning – when, how, who or even do we do it at all, we didn’t last year but then maybe that’s one reason why our crop has been modest. Or maybe there are other (many) reasons we only got under 100 bottles of our wine. I will of course keep you all informed as the year of 2021 draws to a close.