Half full

This is the sort of thing you want to read about your first bottles of wine:

“Otterfarm Seyval Blanc Sparkling Wine 2010 tastes fantastic after 2nd fermentation! Young, but tell you what, this is serious stuff”. Tweeted by Ulrich the winemaker (@VividWinesUK) on Saturday night, it rather made my day.

This year has been a hard one as far as the vineyard goes. A lovely April and early May had many people in English wine counting chickens..June and July had many kicking the cat. Flowering was hindered on the normally reliable Seyval, with the little cap that sits on the flowers unable to release and blow away in the damp, overcast conditions. Without good flowering, pollination was hindered and fruitset very limited. As a result we have little Seyval to follow on from last years.

This isn’t good as as lot of time, effort and money has gone into the vineyard this year – the mower, steel canes to replace the bamboo ones that the trunk of the vines are tied to, many days of planting, weeding and feeding.

On the upside, the more tricky-to-grow Pinot noir is doing very well indeed. They flowered in sunnier, drier conditions and despite a less than sensible summer they are looking good. We only have a few hundred Pinot vines (with a few hundred younger ones catching up) so we’ll not be looking at a huge harvest this year, even with the few Seyval we can add in.

In the meantime we have to take care of what we have – knocking off any small bunches that don’t look like they’ll make it to maturity (so that the plant’s energies aren’t wasted), keeping an eye out for disease, and thinning out the leaves around the bunches…

The bad luck has an upside: if the grapes mature as we hope, it forces us to make something different to last year’s Seyval-only sparkling. A small run it maybe, but it’s an excuse to discover whether an Otter Farm Rose or a sparkling from Pinot and Seyval is going to be special.

I’ll call Ulrich tomorrow and see what he thinks.

  • So many producers of crops are struggling this year I wonder if this is the future.

    Why do you have steel poles?

  • Love a bit of bad luck with an upside, sounds exciting. Im coming to the conclusion that I am overworking my grape vine: loads of bunches but just one looks appealing to eat and it's the one that has no neighbours. There'll be a lot more knocking off for me next year.

    PS Im not sure you're meant to do that, with the leaves. Someone knowledgable told me that once.

  • 'Fess up now..
    Your life is mostly about sauntering around your acres eating things and doing a bit of bunch knocking-off or leaf plucking.
    And them coming inside for some light tweeting and a glass of something to go with your cake.
    There is no real labour involved, is there? Except for driving around in your air-conditioned, cushion seated tractor listening to Merle Haggard.

    The next step will be velvet jodphurs and a cravat.

  • Simon – I saw David Bellamy at Hampton Court this summer….a man sausagey of finger was my first thought. Cap'n Birdseye my second.

    PG – Fruit seems to have done well mostly, maybe the cold got thoe plants worrying for their lives and needing to reproduce. Steel canes, with the vines tied to them, so that when the mower comes along and hits them ther's enough resistance to send the retractable arm back in (see the blog from a few weeks ago)…bamboo can snap or rot and then the mower just goes straight through the vine….

    Jo T – Ive heard that about ou

    Lia L – You're very right about the bunches; you're very wrong about the leaves. And you a poncey gardening journo n all

    JAS – I imagine jodhpurs would leave me looking very much like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP6N1bgar8A&feature=related. Great word jodhpurs

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