Officially a new start and a new vintage...
No one can accuse me of writing too many blogs! It’s now June and a year’s worth of updates will be a challenge to keep concise but I’ll do my best…
Last year, as mentioned before, we were horribly frosted. How the vineyard came back from that was a learning experience. In a good year we might have around 2.5 tonnes of grapes from the bacchus - last year we had just under 500Kg. The Schonburger was a write-off - bar a few buckets, the seyval came back fighting and delivered around 1.5 tonnes. So it was a measly harvest. The silver lining was that the reduced number of grapes ripened quickly and we had one of our earliest harvests and managed to get it in all on one day. Finally the sun shone on us too. So what that means is that in 2021 we have just under 500 bottles of bacchus to sell - it’s just been released this June, and it is packed full of flavour as the vines poured all their energy into those few grapes.
Last year one of the highlights was that I was successful in my application for a start up business grant from the Princes Countryside Fund in partnership with Forest Holidays. I was very lucky to be successful and it’s not just helped with having some pennies to push the business but also included mentoring support. The last few years have been undoubtedly hard and frequently lonely but for the last 9 months or so I’ve had Sam and Gemma on my journey too, constantly giving me moral support and enthusiasm whilst offering their skills and resources. They have been incredible. They know that one of my challenges has been not having a civilised space that allows me to keep people dry and safe (particularly at harvesting) and it really limits what I can offer. So they have let me borrow a giant beautiful tent. It will mean I don’t have to worry about what the weather will do and I can make plans as well as make the most of this beautiful space.
This year is also another year of new starts as in December I finally bought the vineyard off my mother (with some help from my partner Ryan). I think the process took almost 10 months, perhaps because of Covid. It feels incredible to be working for myself properly at last and that all things are possible.
A huge goal for the year was to prune the vines so that for the first time I wouldn’t need to bring in contractors. Under some expert tutelage in Feb, Ryan and I proceeded to storm our way through the vineyard despite the snow and the rain. Having a lesson so late in the season wasn’t ideal and it’s generally been quite frantic. Thankfully, our friends (Sarah, Ross and kids Scarlet and Max) piled in to help in the early months. We also planted around 300 vines in May with the help of volunteers - a mix of pinot noir and replacements where vines were starting to fail. Having destroyed ourselves last year digging holes manually we decided to bring in the proper equipment which made the experience far more humane and speedy.
At the moment because the new bacchus has arrived (the old one has now all gone bar the odd bottle) we’ve just started going back to farmers markets. We’ve got a juggling act between doing markets, tours and keeping the odd day for ourselves so we haven’t made it back to Cirencester yet. The tours have started and we’ve been enjoying socialising (at a good distance obviously) with new visitors. We have some beautiful locally made benches with parasols and everyone has enjoyed Ceri’s delicious cheeses from Brinkworth Dairy. Regular customers will spot our new labels look different - we’ve kept things similar, but hopefully you’ll all agree it’s an upgrade that does more justice to the contents of the bottle.
I’d just like to do a shout out for all the fantastic people who’ve given us a hand over the last year, harvesting, planting, etc - we couldn’t have done it with out you. Special thanks to the folk at Forest Holidays and Princes Countryside Fund for providing an opportunity that I could go for and that is already pushing my business forward this year. Thank you to all our customers local or otherwise for all your support. Hopefully we’ll see lots of new and familiar faces on our open day during Carnival.