2023 - Just a Blur
2023 feels like a blur, in honesty. I think having a baby/now a toddler, juggling full time work and the vineyard has meant the year has merged into a homogenous mess. I think the first 3 years of taking on the vineyard was learning what was needed and trying to get on top of it. Then baby Reuben came along and the vineyard has had to take a back seat. Time has been short we’ve had to prioritise. Despite the challenges, I think we’ve had a pretty good year.
2023 started off badly. Only because trying to prune the vineyard, tie it up and do post maintenance, with a baby….didn’t really happen. We were very late and some posts just didn’t get done. Many times I have contemplated how sensible it is that new vineyards are planted with steel posts. We also had run out of wine pretty much by Christmas and had made the decision to make quite a lot of it to replenish. We tend to do a trade off of selling grapes to help pay winery bills but actually this year has just seen a big investment in making sure we have enough of our own wine.
On a happy note, this year we did not get frosted. That’s the first time in a long time. We had a fight on our hands quite early on in the year with downey mildew. High humidity and perfect conditions meant we were not the only vineyard struggling to keep a lid on it horribly early in the season. If it spreads then it kills off the leaves and there would be bare vines left in the middle of summer. It also behaved differently to previously this year in that it started first going for the berries before the leaves.
This year was the first year that I felt like we really started to understand and nail our spray programme. It’s not nice feeling bamboozled by the complexities of a spray programme that someone else puts together for you. There are no compromises that can made with the conditions we had and I really feel like we cracked it. We’ve spent so much time swotting up trying to make the right decisions at the right time to optimise saving crops. I feel like we are much better equipped and confident for this year coming. We still had the juggling act of time and thankfully the seyval blanc is fairly hardy and resistant - it had to get by without any assistance at all for the whole year. That means it also didn’t get to benefit from any of the foliar feeds we provide which isn’t very helpful for it either. It turned out to be a pretty substantial harvest for us. We couldn’t save everything but we did end up with plenty of beautiful grapes come harvesting time. We experimented with a green harvest on the seyval to help thin it out with a view to making some verjuice. It worked, but we need to come up with a better bottling solution so it was a useful pilot.
Over the last 3 years we’ve been gradually replanting and putting in some baby pinot noir vines in between the seyval vines - as they are clearly coming to the end of their life. Unfortunately, every year the new little vines we diligently dig holes for, get slugged to death. If they don’t die of thirst then they get eaten by snails and slugs, especially if next to the trees. It is depressing. We got a water bowser in the summer and tried to give the baby vines a helping hand but it is the snails that are the worst. This winter we need to have a rethink as it’s really not sustainable to keep replanting three rows again and again every year. And it is back breaking. I like the idea of planting a very hardy variety, which potentially we first grow in pots so they can get some significant leaves before they go in the ground. I think in an ideal world I’d like us to have a robot mower as it seems to have multiple benefits - not just in reducing the amount of strimming we have to do, but I can see it might also help these new plantings to survive. I keep an eye open on the various farming or rural funding pots that come up (robotics and carbon reduction is definitely a thing) but in all cases we keep finding that we are either not eligible or generally too small as a business.
In the Summer, we got our new rose sparkling and we love it. It is delicious (thank goodness!) and a lovely subtle gentle colour. It is made with our seyval with a little pinot noir from the winery. It was like the perfect summer wine and it arrived just in time. With our wine stocks looking quite solid we could make some different choices this summer and we decided to sell the seyval (it’s gone to make a natural wine), and we also sold our schonburger to make Tim Wildman’s petnat. There was some left over which went in with our bacchus and a bucket or two of seyval, some of which is being oaked to blend into our own Cloud nine still blend. That wine should come through in spring sometime in 2024. It was lovely having Tim and also some ladies from London come harvesting with our volunteer pickers and we had the most incredible harvesting weather and lovely company.
At the moment, we’re pruning the vineyard - or I should probably say that Mark, who is a local volunteer whose recently joined us, has been pruning the vineyard. I’m not sure sure what we’ve done to deserve so much assistance but for once, we seem to be on target for getting things done when they should be. We have also got our first tours already booked in for the season which feels frighteningly organised. I’m hoping we can get a field shelter of some description in soon just to give us a bit more of an all weather shelter for the season - all TBC.
Harvesters 2023!
This was our second day harvesting the seyval with a smaller team