harvest 2013 - the details

picking the Bacchus

Now all the grapes are in the winery, pressed and mostly fermented it is time to reflect on the last season.

2013 has been a year of its own difficulties, a cold late spring delayed bud-burst, followed by a hot dry mid summer and the wettest and least sunny autumn we have recorded over the last 4 years. 

The good stuff: the grapes kept disease-free and amazingly the birds showed no interest in eating them, allowing us the luxury of leaving the fruit longer on the vines without risk of harm. This was just as well because they ripened very late and slowly in the damp and cloudy October. Picking started a week later than normal and finished on the 6th November - at least a week later than we have been used to. Many, many thanks to all those who came out to help picking; it doesn't really need saying that we couldn't do it without your help!

Ortega grapes ready to go to the winery

Sugar levels are a little lower than we achieve in the hotter years and acids maybe a little higher, however the wines taste balanced and full flavoured. In the end as the wines come through fermentation, we are seeing some beautiful delicate aromas and full length of interesting fruit characters. Overall the 2013 wines are showing a lot of promise at this stage.

The storm at the end of October did cause a few problems in that our electricity was disrupted for 2 days and we had to press grapes and work through the night by torch and candle light. Luckily we have a generator that can power the winery machinery (but not the lighting) so we could continue picking through the power cut. Even after 20 years of making wine, this was the first time I have had to work in the dark.

winery at night by torchlight ....

.... and by candle-light

The yield from the vineyard didn't quite match 2006 or 2010, but was very close to our best years and due to the 2007 planted vines coming into full production, the volume of wine from this year is a significant improvement on previous years.

As usual we have made the dry white wines without any winery additives - no yeast, sulphur dioxide, enzymes or fining agents. The press that we installed 3 years ago has allowed us to press the grapes very slowly and gently to maximise flavours.

I expect to produce a Horsmonden dry white wine, two different sparkling wine blends (a Blanc de blancs and our Limney Estate blend) and for the first time in many years we are making a small amount of Rose wine from our Pinot Noir grapes at Diamond Field.

Harvest started at last!

Today in the sunshine we had our first day picking as promised. A lovely warm day and lots of organic grapes. The Siegerrebe makes up a crucial part of our Horsmonden dry white wine blend as it has a soft acidity and a delicious aromatic style. It will make up about 15% of the blend.

This years crop of Siegerrebe has been wonderful - no mildew, very little bird damage and a good yield at around 2kgs per vine. The grapes are taken straight to the winery at Rotherfield where the press is loaded and started immediately. The photo above shows the juice running from the press. This juice will be settled overnight and then we hope fermentation will start spontaneously without the need for adding yeast.

Thanks to all who helped with picking today - fantastic job. I hope you will want to return for the next day picking (we will probably have 2 or 3 days picking next week).

Grape picking starts next week!

Siegerrebe grapes ready to pick

Pinot Noir - a week to go at least

After one of the sunniest summers this year we find that the grapes are slightly late in their ripening this year. We have been extremely patient watching the grapes in a week when we would normally be madly picking. Our first variety to pick is Siegerrebe which we normally harvest around the 20th September. This year it is still unpicked with a harvest planned for Monday the 7th October - the latest ever for this variety. The reason for this is the cold wet weather in the Spring that we've probably forgotten about by now. Bud burst was a fortnight behind normal and flowering was also late. Often the vines catch up from a slow start, but this year they haven't managed it. :Luckily the weather is looking OK into mid October so we can afford to wait.

The great news is that we have a good crop of healthy grapes - one of the biggest crops I have seen on our vines. This is true across almost all varieties, the exception being the Pinot Noir at our Rotherfield site where we have been fighting a war against Downy mildew all summer. The winner of this war is yet to be decided, but we have used copper fungicide (allowed under Soil Association rules) and many hours of thinning out the vines.

Picking is done by hand with fine secateurs, and we are always interested to hear from anyone interested in doing a day picking. We try to chose sunny days so the grapes arrive at the winery dry. We will have about 7 days picking spread through October. Please get in touch if you're interested.

Today sees the commisioning of our second solar panel system, installed on the sunniest day so far this year. It was switched on and immediately started clocking up the kilowatts. Our total generation capacity has just doubled to 15 Kw.

Last year we had an energy use audit done on our winery, including the energy used in the vineyard  (tractor diesel etc). It makes a long and complicated (possibly dull to some) read but came up with the conclusion that we are energy neutral. The solar panels on the winery roof generate as much energy as we use to make our wines. Now with double the solar panels, we will be generating a big surplus which gets sent back to the electricity grid for use by others.

We are constantly looking for ways to minimise electricity consumption, further increasing our efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint of each bottle of our wine. The winery is now fitted with LED lighting, replacing our old lights and halving the running cost of lighting in the winter. Also the cooling system in the winery runs on a water based system (sometimes called a swamp chiller) which uses a small fraction of the energy used by air conditioning.

I could go on about lightweight glass bottles, recycled cardboard cartons, sustainable natural corks - all of these use energy to produce and ship to the UK and so we make great efforts to be as sustainable as possible at all stages of winemaking, from the vineyard / glass factory / cork forest right through to delivering the wine to your door.

Pruning

We are finishing pruning today in the snow! The end of a task that started at the beginning of December, with 20000 vines to prune. Each vine is pruned back to two canes which will produce this seasons crop. All the rest is cut off and mulched into the soil. I find pruning on a clear sunny (but normally cold) day is a real pleasure, but this year we have have plenty of snow and rain plus very cold temperatures, we are all pleased to be finished.

As the vines get older we are training new trunks up to the wire so that we can renew as much of the old wood as possible and remove any diseases in the trunk wood. Every pruning cut is also painted with Trichoderma, a beneficial fungi that helps to prevent harmful spores infecting pruning cuts.

Talking of sunshine, I have just ordered some more solar panels for the winery roof. Ever the optimist, I am hoping we can not only produce enough electricity for the winery but also offset the carbon emmisions for the vineyard tractors as well. The new panels should be up and running by the nd of April, ready for the late Spring heatwave.

My first blog entry.

This blog is hopefully to record the events that happen in the running of our vineyard and winery over the year. I hope to post a new entry every 2 to 4 weeks and let you know of events we are attending, stages in the vineyard year, some technical stuff about our organic vines, problems that inevitably happen as well as the good things too.

If you want to see anything in the blog, please ask and I will do my best to include your requests.

Please follow this blog and you will be updated when new postings are made - all are welcome.

Our vineyard sheep arrived last week and are busy eating the grass under the vines so we can start the year with a clean vineyard floor. The sheep are Wiltshire Horns, an old English breed that seem to enjoy our cold weather. They are on loan from a local breeder, but we hope in future to start our own flock.