Vineyard September 2020

VINEYARD for viticulturists in Great Britain ™

SEPTEMBER 2020

EDITOR’S VISIT Nichola and Jonathan have the ultimate work from home gig

MATTHEW JUKES WINE REVIEW Throwing out the rule book

HARVESTING CHECKLIST Expert advice

STAGING A COMEBACK Shakespeare's land becomes family vineyard

VINEYARD CONSULTANTS • Planning Applications

• Site Finding

• Site Aquisition

• Leases

• Grants •

Matthew Berryman 07710 765323 matthew@c-l-m.co.uk

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www.vineyardmagazine.co.uk VINEYARD Kelsey Media, The Granary, Downs Court Yalding Hill, Yalding, Maidstone, Kent, ME18 6AL 01959 541444 EDITORIAL Editor: Rebecca Chaplin vineyard.ed@kelsey.co.uk Studio Manager: Jo Legg jo.legg@kelsey.co.uk Graphic Designer: James Pitchford james.pitchford@kelsey.co.uk ADVERTISEMENT SALES Simon Hyland Talk Media Sales Ltd 01732 445327 Simon.Hyland@talkmediasales.co.uk PHOTOGRAPHER Martin Apps www.countrywidephotographic.co.uk MANAGEMENT CHIEF EXECUTIVE: Steve Wright CHIEF OPERATING Officer: Phil Weeden MANAGING DIRECTOR: Kevin McCormick PUBLISHER: Jamie McGrorty RETAIL DIRECTOR: Steve Brown RENEWALS AND PROJECTS MANAGER: Andy Cotton SENIOR SUBSCRIPTION MARKETING MANAGER: Nick McIntosh SUBSCRIPTION MARKETING DIRECTOR: Gill Lambert SUBSCRIPTION MARKETING MANAGER: Kate Chamberlain SENIOR PRINT PRINT PRODUCTION MANAGER: Georgina Harris PRINT PRODUCTION CONTROLLER: Kelly Orriss DISTRIBUTION Distribution in Great Britain: Marketforce (UK) 3rd Floor, 161 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9AP Tel: 020 3148 5000

NEWS 8

Support through warehouse lockdown

10

College to launch retraining programme in response to Covid-19

15

Interactive wine and spirit map for ‘staycationers’ launched

16

Around the world

REGULARS 24

Matthew Jukes

36

The agronomy diary

37

The vine post

38

Representing you

40

Crop protection

PRINTING Precision Colour Print Kelsey Media 2020 © all rights reserved. Kelsey Media is a trading name of Kelsey Publishing Ltd. Reproduction in whole or in part is forbidden except with permission in writing from the publishers. Note to contributors: articles submitted for consideration by the editor must be the original work of the author and not previously published.

Where photographs are included, which are not the property of the contributor, permission to reproduce them must have been obtained from the owner of the copyright. The editor cannot guarantee a personal response to all letters and emails received. The views expressed in the magazine are not necessarily those of the Editor or the Publisher. Kelsey Publishing Ltd accepts no liability for products and services offered by third parties.

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Rule breakers are starting from a blank page.

Protect grape quality and rebuild reserves for next year.

Working with the GLAA at harvest 2020.

Updates from the industry’s membership organisation.

Vineyard Magazine finds out from Gusbourne about how they protect their vines from pests and diseases.

41 Yeast and nutrition Monitoring nitrogen.

46

Machinery

Surging demand.

Front cover image: Welcombe Hills © Sally Crane Photography

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CONTENTS Features

20 22 26 42

2020 WineGB Awards WineGB announces 2020 Award winners after unprecedented tasting.

In conversation Elise Lane set up urban winery Laneberg Wine in Gateshead three years ago and today her wines are stocked in Fortnum & Mason as its own label Bacchus.

Editor’s Visit In a time when so many people are shifting from office life to remote working, Nichola and Jonathan Kelsey have the ultimate work from home gig.

Harvest checklist There’s more to consider than ever before for harvest 2020 and we get some expert advice on how to prepare.

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August has been a month of extremes. If we thought the heatwave in lockdown was hot, it was nothing compared to the one just gone and the wet and windy weather? Nothing compared to the summer storms.

While the weather seems to be a good guide for this 2020 madness, vineyards have sparked to life with new vigour when reopening for tours and tastings. The saying about never knowing what you had until it’s gone is true, and I’ve spoken to so many people who knew they loved meeting guests in their vineyard but didn’t realise just how much they would miss it when they couldn’t do it.

Harvest is around a month away for the south of England, so no wonder everyone seems to be on high alert as they prepare. This month I spoke to Joel from Vine-Works who are preparing for a harvest when preventing the spread of Covid-19.

Maybe day-to-day life has become a bit too lax about these precautions, and where staying in your bubble becomes a bit more normal. However, harvest and tours are the times when we are welcoming people from outside that circle into the vineyard and the precautions being taken by Vine-Works were an eye-opener to just how much there is to consider.

Whether you’re using your friends and family or contracted labour, there are many risk factors and transfer points. You can read advice about preparing for a safe and successful harvest with more advice from the Ridgeview Vineyard Manager on page 42.

Outside the box thinking has definitely been a theme of the month, with not only Vine-Works needing to rethink the traditional plans. Matthew Jukes has been reviewing rebels, who have gone against the grain to produce something brilliant. I’ve been speaking with two unusual businesses too.

Firstly, Elise Lane from Laneberg Winery has been talking about setting up the most northernly winery in the UK and producing a Bacchus for Fortnum & Mason.

Meanwhile, this month’s Editors’ Visit was to Welcombe Hills Vineyard in Stratford-upon-Avon. The owners are an inspiring pair who have picked up the reigns from a maverick grower and the story is one of Shakespearean proportions.

As such a young producing nation compared to the well-established wine countries, who knows exactly what the future holds on the long road ahead. With inspiring creators, rule breakers and future trend setters it's great to know beyond these challenging times we’ll still have some British eccentricity.

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S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

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NEWS

Support through warehouse lockdown When the coronavirus lockdown loomed large on 25th March, The Wine Society closed their warehouse to shield their staff and turned to Johnston Logistics UK to temporarily manage their entire stock.

The world’s oldest co-operative wine merchant, The Wine Society chose Johnston Logistics UK in late 2018 to help deliver the logistics needed to satisfy their rapidly growing membership.

Less than 18 months later, they called Johnston Logistics UK to ask if they could immediately manage their entire logistics as they entered lockdown against the coronavirus pandemic.

“We closed our warehouse and offices for just under 2 weeks to protect our staff and review our operational processes. This was only made possible by Johnston Logistics who directly received and distributed 379 extra pallets in those weeks alone,” said Alex Vooght, inventory manager for The Wine Society.

Iain Hill, head of commercial & customer services at Johnston Logistics UK, said: “It was an unprecedented time where almost all our clients were turning to us to hold on to more stock, move more essential goods or simply handle everything. When The Wine Society’s call came, we simply looked at our resources, moved a few things around and said yes!”

Stocking over 1,500 wines from around the world, The Wine Society is one of the UK’s largest online wine retailers. Norfolk-based Johnston

Logistics UK provide HMRC bonded warehousing to help receive, store and distribute their member’s choices.

Vooght said: “Johnston Logistics agreement to accept these additional deliveries at such short notice was invaluable. We have some tricky deliveries to check and the receipts went very smoothly. Their team also did a great job when

we started to recall a large amount of the stock back to us."

Johnston Logistics UK experienced an increase of 810% in throughput of products for some drinks-industry clients, as locked-down Brits turned to their favourite tipples. The Wine Society too has seen a large increase in demand throughout lockdown and beyond.

Distribution secured in Japan

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Black Chalk English Sparkling Wine has reached a significant milestone, securing distribution in Japan, the second largest market for sparkling wine.

The move has been driven by Black Chalk director and investor, Kenya Matsumoto, who owns two Mayfair-based Japanese restaurants: Cubé and Kaiseki-specialist, Roketsu.

Matsumoto is behind Frontive Holding, the agency which will be responsible for securing distribution for Black Chalk. Black Chalk will be investing significantly in the Japanese market and – in what is believed to be a first for an English wine brand – will put a dedicated team in place, which will operate out of Tokyo. In the long term, Frontive Holdings will become the gateway to other key markets in Asia, specifically China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

Black Chalk has already secured listings in Japan’s most celebrated Michelinstarred restaurants, including: Kikunoi in Kyoto; Gion Kawakami, also in Kyoto; Sushi Sho in Tokyo; and Nakashima in Hiroshima, as well as luxury department stores Mitsukoshi-Isetan and Hankyu in Tokyo and Osaka.

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

Frontive Holdings will also supply direct to the consumer, via online. The first shipment of Black Chalk’s 2015 Classic and the soon-to-be-released 2017 Wild Rose will soon be arriving in Japan in time for the Autumn UK trade fairs in Tokyo and Osaka.

Black Chalk has announced a series of expansion plans over the last 10 months.

In September 2019, a £1.5m investment was secured and a tasting room and shop subsequently opened. In January this year, Black Chalk announced the acquisition of four vineyard sites spanning 12 hectares in Hampshire’s Test Valley, and building started on a new winery. The winery is now nearing the final stages of construction and will be ready to receive the 2020 harvest.

Black Chalk’s winemaker and CEO Jacob Leadley commented: “We have prioritised Japan as our target export market from the outset. There is such a strong synergy between English Sparkling Wine and Japanese cuisine, and Japan is a market where quality, boutique brands are very highly valued.

“After the last few months when, like others in the English wine industry, we were impacted by lockdown, this has been a really positive move for us and underlines how important export markets will be, moving forward.”

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NEWS

College to launch retraining programme in response to Covid-19 In response to the economic impact felt because of Covid-19 and with Brexit on the horizon, Plumpton College is set to launch a brand-new retraining programme called ‘Entry into Viticulture’.

It’s designed to help employers with their immediate workforce requirements by providing potential employees with the necessary sector-specific operational skills they demand.

The ‘Entry into Viticulture’ retraining programme is a one-week intensive course designed to provide job seekers and career changers with relevant qualifications and introductory knowledge, sector engagement and a guaranteed interview from a recruiting industry employer.

Principal of Plumpton College Jeremy Kerswell said: “Recent studies found that Brighton alone is expecting more than 30,000 redundancies in the catering and hospitality sector and Crawley has the second highest rate of furlough in the country; with this in mind Plumpton’s response to the current challenges in the jobs market is to launch our re-training programme, ‘Entry into Viticulture’.

“As a leading land-based college, Plumpton has developed programmes specifically to meet the needs of the sector and local employment opportunities. We have worked closely with local economic partnerships, land-based sector bodies and the Department of Work

10

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

and Pensions to ensure the programmes meet the identified local economic and skills priorities. If you’re a business with immediate staffing requirements this is a programme for producers to get involved with.”

The programme will be delivered by specialist staff across viticulture with the pilot programme due to take place early in September.

Vineyards or wine businesses looking to recruit staff to support with harvest or those with more long-term requirements that want to be involved with this programme, or individuals looking to take part, can contact the business services team at Plumpton.

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NEWS

Seven-figure funding to stabilise business and save 140 jobs International wine business Boutinot has secured funding from HSBC UK to bolster its long-term future.

It has been backed by a seven-figure package from HSBC UK to ensure it can adapt operations throughout trading uncertainty caused by Covid-19. The package will stabilise outgoings and ensure job security for its 140 staff.

Boutinot is based in Cheadle, Greater Manchester, and owns Henners Vineyard in Hastings. In 2017 Boutinot bought the site before expanding it late in 2018 to add a hospitality centre.

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Boutinot sells to supermarkets, independent wholesalers and directly to pubs and restaurants, meaning the lockdown caused widespread disruption. It was particularly affected by income reduced from bars and restaurant sales, however, it has enjoyed a significant increase from supermarkets and retail.

Michael Moriarty, commercial director at Boutinot, said: "The drinks industry has obviously been heavily impacted by Covid-19 and we have been reviewing ways of adjusting since the lockdown came into effect.

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

"HSBC UK has been incredibly responsive throughout this difficult time and helped us continue trading safely."

Ben Clarke, relationship director for HSBC UK, corporate banking, Manchester, added: "We're delighted to support Boutinot throughout this turbulent period of trading and have been impressed with the rapid response of the business to this crisis.

"Hospitality remains one of the UK's most economically affected sectors but it's reassuring to know that long term futures can still be supported."

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NEWS

First vintage released Kinsbrook Vineyard, which lies just outside West Chiltington, Sussex, has announced the release of its exceptional trio of debut wines.

The family-owned and run vineyard, founded in 2014 and featured in July’s issue of Vineyard Magazine, is releasing its 2014 Sparkling Vintage Cuvée made by celebrated local winemaker Dermot Sugrue.

Kinsbrook is also offering a limited production Bacchus and Pinot Gris made in the heart of the Sussex countryside.

Kinsbrook’s Sparkling Vintage Cuvée boasts a mouth-watering crispness with aromas of orchard fruit. This is beautifully overlaid with toasted brioche and honeyed almonds, characteristic of a wine which has been aged for nearly six years on lees.

The Bacchus grape is ideally suited to England’s cool climate and Kinsbrook’s expression of this is through a low-alcohol wine (10.6%) which is infused with mouth-tingling acidity and herbaceous notes. Meanwhile the semi-aromatic Pinot Gris is a highly-complex, clarity-driven acidic wine with notes of apple, stone fruit and sweet spices.

Kinsbrook Vineyard is also experimenting with the ‘forgotten’ Champagne grape varieties once used in France; it is believed to be one of the only plantings in the country. These varieties will be ready for their first harvest in 2021.

Owner Joe Beckett said: “Our hand-crafted wines exemplify the potential of England’s viticulture. Four years ago I visited the wineries on Waiheke Island in New Zealand and felt

inspired to not only set up my own vineyard on my family’s third generation farm, but to create a complete wine tourism experience around it. I’m so excited to finally have our first vintage and I’m looking forward to sharing it with people both local and from further afield.”

The Bacchus will retail at £18, the Pinot Gris at £19 and the sparkling at £35.

Sustainable Wines of Great Britain

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WineGB has now announced the first British vineyards and wineries to formally achieve recognition for their sustainable credentials, with the formal accreditation process then underway.

Twelve producers have now received Sustainable Wines of Great Britain (SWGB) certification. These, the first standard bearers of the industry’s environmental sustainability scheme, range from boutique vineyards to major wine producers, plus a contract winery operation.

Other producers are currently undergoing the auditing process and will receive their certification in the near future.

The accreditation process entails an annual self-evaluation to monitor progress against guidelines set out to fulfil the SWGB objectives.

Upon joining, and then every three years, each self-evaluation score is then checked and verified by independent auditors. The appointed independent auditors of the scheme are the environmental consultancy Ricardo PLC. The original 30 Founder Members of the Scheme between them account for some 40% of the total hectarage under vine in the UK, with a production capability of around 6.8m bottles.

All founder members are listed on the SWGB section of the WineGB website, with those who have achieved their certification highlighted accordingly.

Bob Lindo of Camel Valley Vineyards, one of the first accredited producers, said: “We have been following sustainable practices for many years now and to have gained SWGB accreditation reinforces all that what we have

done. It sends out a powerful message to all our customers that we are proud custodians of our land and how we produce our wines.”

Nick Wenman, owner of Albury Biodynamic Vineyard in Surrey added: “We believe wholeheartedly in the value of SWGB credentials. More and more of our consumers care very much that we as producers are looking after our environment and are reassured by our commitment to sustainability in the vineyard.”

Chris Foss chairs the industry working group behind SWGB and commented: “We are delighted to welcome the first fully accredited producers, and there are many others not far behind. Sustainability credentials bring real value not only to individual producers but underpin the overall industry values.”

The first wines to bear the full status will come from the 2020 harvest, when accredited producers will be permitted to include the certification mark on their labels. Leading retailers Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, representatives of whom sit on the SWGB working group alongside grape growers and winemakers, are backing this initiative, and will be helping to support the wines when they are released.

The Scheme’s sustainability objectives are promoted through guidelines, which encourage best practice and establish standards in both the vineyard and winery. These include areas such as the conservation of the environment, and minimising the use of sprays, water and energy with the ultimate goal of producing outstanding grapes and wines.

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

The first vineyards and wineries with Sustainable Wines of Great Britain certification: ◆ Albury Organic Vineyard,

Surrey ◆ Bee Tree Vineyard, West

Sussex ◆ Camel Valley Vineyard &

Winery, Cornwall ◆ Chilworth Manor Vineyard,

Surrey ◆ Defined Wine Ltd, Kent ◆

Easing Hill Vineyard, Worcestershire

◆ Grange Estate Vineyard,

Hampshire ◆ High Clandon Estate

Vineyard, Surrey ◆ Hush Heath Estate

Vineyard, Kent ◆ Nyetimber Vineyard,

Sussex ◆ Three Choirs Vineyard &

Winery, Gloucestershire ◆ Venn Valley Vineyard,

Devon ◆ Yotes Court Vineyard, Kent

Interactive wine and spirit map for ‘staycationers’ launched The Wine and Spirit Trade Association has launched a new interactive map showing some of Britain’s best distillery and vineyard destinations to help ‘staycationers’ learn more about the art of wine and spirit making.

Last month the Royal Household launched a premium small-batch London dry gin. The spirit is infused with 12 botanicals, several of which are from Buckingham Palace garden, including lemon verbena, hawthorn berries, bay leaves and mulberry leaves.

The Buckingham Palace Gin follows the debut in 2016 of the Queen’s first English sparkling wine, grown on Windsor Great Park, which went on sale to mark the Queen’s 90th birthday and sold out almost immediately.

The WSTA’s digital map has been designed to celebrate the best of homegrown British wine and spirits by recommending UK vineyards and distilleries which offer tours, tastings and places to eat and stay on site.

It includes over 50 stop offs, across the country, where our talented wine makers and distillers are opening their doors to the public sharing the behind the scenes secrets of their craft.

Miles Beale, Chief Executive of the Wine and Spirit Trade Association said: “The UK’s growing wine and spirit industries are a real success story, but don’t just take our word for it, even Her Majesty the Queen is offering her royal seal of approval to these great British drinks.

“The ginaissance has led to a huge wave of investment in exciting new distillery visitor centres and tours. There are now more English vineyards offering tours, tastings and dining experiences than ever before. To celebrate our great British distillers and wine makers we have launched the UK’s first digital wine and spirit map.

“The pandemic means that more people are choosing to enjoy a staycation over the summer and this August Bank Holiday weekend. The WSTA’s interactive map has been designed to encourage people to find out more about the wave of exciting new wine and spirit experiences on their doorsteps.”

A click on the grape icon will take you to an information page on a UK vineyard including their website where details of tours and more can be found. Click on the spirit bottle for information on distilleries and websites detailing a variety of tours and gin making experiences on offer.

A visit to a vineyard will help visitors understand why English sparkling wine is now rivalling Champagne to such an extent that Taittinger and Pommery Champagne houses have invested in vineyards in the south of England.

Britain now boasts over 763 vineyards, over 260 of which were established in the last 5 years, leading to the planting of over 3 million vines across UK slopes.

Following the combined harvest of 2018 and 2019 Britain produced the equivalent of over 23 million bottles of still and sparkling wine – compared to less than 10 million bottles over the 2015 and 2016 harvests.

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NEWS

Around the world Co-op provides support to Chilean wine producers during Covid-19 pandemic.

Co-op has helped safeguard the future of its wine producers by providing vital funding and support, as part of its global wellbeing charter.

Going beyond its Fairtrade commitment, the community retailer has reallocated £10,000 of funding to provide vital food parcels that are currently in dire need in the wine growing communities of Chile. These food parcels will help feed 1,250 people across 300 families within the community, for up to three months.

The devastating impact of coronavirus on global communities has been particularly evident for the wine trade as the closure of the hospitality industry and restrictions on travel have caused profound affects. Growers in the country have been hit hard as a result of the pandemic and the growing political situation at the time of harvest have left many struggling to afford basic essentials like food.

Ed Robinson, wine buyer at Co-op, said: “We are pleased that at a time when many supply chains across the world are facing a raft of new challenges, we are able to respond to these and commit to protecting workers’ livelihoods as we navigate this crisis together.

“As a co-operative, people are naturally at the heart of everything we do and we are committed to helping those people in our supply chain who have been worst affected by the unprecedented impacts of the Covid-19. By repurposing

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our funds, we are funnelling money right to the heart of where it is needed.”

A changing environment and the state of the economy brings uncertainty for the workers who produce the worlds food and drink and it’s more important than ever to put measures in place to make sure that everyone gets a fair deal. In a bid to alleviate the cashflow challenge Co-op has also doubled its rate of ordering with South African, Argentinean and Chilean Fairtrade wine producers. This helps cash flow for producers and minimises their exposure to expensive loans.

The retailer explained how, from bananas to coffee through to flowers and wine, with every product that is sold on Fairtrade terms, a bit more money goes to Fairtrade communities. The more sales, the more premium to invest in the community, the more produce is protected by the Fairtrade Minimum Price which ensures that producers should at least get the cost of production in times of global price crash.

Euan Venters, commercial director at the Fairtrade Foundation, said: “The crisis has laid bare the underlying fragility in so many of our food supply chains, but it has also highlighted how businesses with commitments to human rights, environmental sustainability and poverty reduction embedded in company values have responded meaningfully. We’d like to raise a glass to Co-op for leading the way by going above their Fairtrade commitment and supporting producers to weather the storm during these difficult times.”

NEWS

Wines of Germany campaign launched in UK The London based Wines of Germany UK agency has launched a campaign in order to support small and medium-size retailers in the UK in their promotion of German wines.

Interested retailers are able to apply for subsidies via the Wines of Germany website until 28th September. Businesses will need to submit their strategies on the promotion of German wines, including the intended use of the granted money.

The aim of the fund is to introduce German wines to a new target group, encourage retailers to develop further engagement with their customers and establish longstanding relationships, said director of Wines of Germany UK Nicky Forrest.

According to Wines of Germany UK there is a “difficult landscape the wine industry now faces”, which needs to be tackled.

By October 2020, retailers to be supported are going to be selected and notified. Over a period of seven months, until April 2021, their promotional activities in the context of this campaign have to be completed.

Requirements for the application are a stock of already three different German producers and five German wines, in order to ensure that the German array of products is well represented.

Additionally, if picked for the support, retailers have to increase the number of German wines in their range to at least eight (with at least two other varieties than Riesling) during the promotional activities.

Wine windows make a come back First used during the bubonic plague to prevent the spread of disease, during the Covid-19 pandemic wine windows are coming back into service.

In the 1600s, wine producers would pass the flask of wine through the window and the customer would pass back their coins on a metal tray for the producer to disinfect before taking the payment.

According to Diletta Corsini of the Wine Windows Association: “Today, during our period of covid-19 pandemic lockdown, the owners of the wine window in Via dell’Isola delle Stinche at the Vivoli ice cream parlor in Florence have reactivated their window for dispensing coffee and ice cream, although not wine.

“Two other nearby wine windows, that of the Osteria delle Brache in Piazza Peruzzi and that of Babae in Piazza Santo Spirito, have taken us back in time by being used for their original purpose—socially-distant wine selling.”

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

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SOCIAL

Talk to us! @VineyardMagGB

paper-plane vineyard.ed@kelsey.co.uk

There’s been so much happening in vineyards this month, with veraison underway for many, vineyard tours operating again and temperatures hotting up!

White Castle Vineyard @welshwines

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A Day in the vineyard #lovemyjob. The sky is the limit and it’s time to fly our kites up, up and away WOW veraison throughout our Rondo #perfectday #Welsh #wine

Mark Driver @SussexWineProd

Brad Greatrix @GreatrixBrad Tillington looking confident, healthy and ready to shine in 2020 @Nyetimber

Poulton Hill Estate @PoultonVineyard

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Bottling nearly over and cages heading off to the cellar for a minimum of three years bottle ageing ... #SussexSparkling @RathfinnyEstate

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Yippee! #Veraison (just!) in the #PinotNoir… I was getting worried! #Vineyard

It's an early start for Leslie and his 1954 Massey tractor. Two fundamental members of the team, especially as we head towards harvest.

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Nania’s Vineyard @naniasvineyard

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#Veraison in Nania's Vineyard.

This 50 year old vine in our garden is where it all began for us. It's where we started messing about with grapes and it led to us planting our little vineyard!

In viticulture, veraison is the onset of ripening. It's like the plant saying "birds eat me and poop out my seeds all over the forest".

For us winemakers it's the countdown to harvest, 40-50 days until vintage 2020!

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Double trouble!

We have just had the blue delivery van wrapped.

If you spot the Vineyard Hobbits out and about, please tag us in your snaps Camera with flash #englishvineyard #cotswolds #englishwine #2cv

The Vines @vines_the Tuffon Hall Vineyard @tuffonhall

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Castlewood Wines @castlewoodwines

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Today we racked our #devonminnow 2019 out of barrel and into tank – ready for bottling next week. It’s great timing as these barrels will only sit empty for a matter of weeks before harvest starts and they are filled once again. @markehix @the_pig_hotels Thirsty work.

Terlingham Vineyard @terlingham_vineyard

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Ready to welcome some very special folk for a wine tasting today! The sun is out, the wine is cold… can't wait!

TAILORED INSURANCE FOR GRAPE GROWERS AND WINE MAKERS Helping protect the UK wine industry Our network of local offices can provide the specialist advice for your vineyard and business.

To find your local specialist viticulture Agent, email:

winegb@nfumutual.co.uk AT BR

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The National Farmers Union Mutual Insurance Society Limited (No. 111982). Registered in England. Registered Office: Tiddington Road, Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire CV37 7BJ. Authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.

AWARDS

2020 WINEGB AWARDS

WineGB announces 2020 Award winners aſter unprecedented tasting The results of the 2020 WineGB Awards were announced in August, with 34 wines awarded gold, 98 silver and 113 bronze as a record number of wines were tasted.

The judging took place in July; co-chairs of the judging panel were TV wine experts Susie Barrie MW and Oz Clarke MBE, along with Rebecca Palmer, wine buyer for leading independent wine merchants Corney & Barrow. There were a record number of wines entered for this competition.

The results show that sparkling wine remains the dominant category in gold and silver medals, but successes for still wines are on the increase.

When it comes to grape varieties, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Bacchus

dominate the still wine category featuring in all the gold medal winning still wines. Chardonnay is the most popular grape variety for Britain’s Traditional Method Sparkling wines – which gained more gold medals than other sparkling styles. Still red wines, notably, achieved their highest ever scores with two gold medals, 15 silvers and nine bronzes awarded, and these were dominated by Pinot Noir.

Susie Barrie commented: “This year of all years it has been a competition to remember. We cannot overlook the extraordinary circumstances in which we judged and I’d like to thank every single person involved in ensuring the week ran smoothly.

BREAKY BOTTOM

Cuvée Cornelis Hendriksen 2013

ASHLING PARK ESTATE

Sparkling Rosé NV

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BREAKY BOTTOM

Gerard Hoffnung 2009

CHAPEL DOWN

CHAPEL DOWN

Chardonnay Clone 809 2018

Kit’s Coty Coeur de Cuvée 2014

GUSBOURNE

Pinot Noir 2018

“We three judges tasted some fantastic wines from a large number of producers and from right across the country. There are some very strong winners, both sparkling and still wines, in all categories. It was particularly pleasing to see new producers competing alongside long-established ones, proving that the UK is an ever-growing and hugely exciting region to watch. Congratulations to every single medal winner, you can feel very proud of what you have achieved.”

Co-Chair Oz Clarke adds: “For once Susie and I had the chance to taste every wine. It made such a difference to our understanding of what is happening north to south, east to west. I feel I have learned so much about our exciting and vibrant Great British Wine world from this week of judging. It was very hard work, but to everyone – thank you very much.”

Fifteen producers entered for the first time, some new to the market, with several Gold Medals being awarded among them.

There were 27 counties from across Great Britain represented, with Sussex dominating the medal table with 48, closely followed by Kent with 45 medals. The Wessex region (Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire) gained 30 medals. Notably, four urban wineries (three in London and one in Tyne & Wear) achieved seven medals between them.

The judging schedule was modified in accordance with strict Covid-19 protocols, with the three judges tasting through all 281 wines over the five-day competition, which was held at Ashling Park Estate who kindly

donated the venue. International Water Supplies provided essential waterbased sanitising equipment, and the Awards were sponsored by Waitrose and industry suppliers Rankin Brothers & Sons.

Belinda Mercer, competition manager, said: “This has been a truly extraordinary year for the WineGB Awards. From Covid-19 risk assessments, PPE equipment, sneeze screens, a reduced panel of three amazing and totally dedicated judges, a logistics team who were so professional and such a pleasure to work with, to our hosts, Ashling Park Estate, who provided us with the most glorious venue and incredible hospitality, the 2020 competition is one that will be etched on our memories forever”.

The competition results also show some new and alternative winemaking styles including oak-aged Bacchus and one ‘stop ferment’ wine, as well as wines from many other grape varieties both long-established and new to Great Britain’s vineyards, illustrating the ever-growing scope and variety of production in the industry. One sparkling wine made from Merlot was awarded a Gold.

The trophy winners, including the crowning of the Supreme Champion will be announced at a special filmed Virtual Ceremony on Tuesday 8th September at midday, with awards being presented by Susie Barrie and Oz Clarke, with author and presenter Peter Richards MW as Master of Ceremonies.

SHARPHAM WINE LTD

BREAKY BOTTOM

Cuvée Michelle Moreau 2014

Pinot Noir 2018

TUFFON HALL VINEYARD

Pinot Rosé, Beatrice 2019

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

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SALES AND MARKETING

E l i se L a

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Elise Lane set up urban winery Laneberg Wine in Gateshead three years ago and today her wines are stocked in Fortnum & Mason as its own label Bacchus. We find out how this happened and what’s next.

g Wi ne eber an

In conversation...

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How and why did you set up your own winery?

I’m from up here. I grew up in Newcastle and Gateshead, and I went down to Oxford and studied for a masters in Chemistry, and after that, I didn’t really know what to do to apply my chemistry degree so I took a graduate role at a large financial services firm in London. Meanwhile, I was studying for my WSET 2 and 3, got to the end of the Level 3 about 10 years ago and it sort of dawned on me that I could apply my chemistry degree to winemaking.

It still took me another five years before I took the plunge. I left my job and took up a place at Plumpton College, to study for a postgraduate diploma in viticulture and oenology. My plan was to graduate, and maybe buy a vineyard and winery somewhere in the south. I worked in the winery at Plumpton for a while, teaching the students and making the wine in 2016, and after that my husband, who is actually from Hampshire, said “How do you fancy moving back home to be near your parents?”

What made you think an urban winery could work in Tyneside?

We came up here and I was inspired by London Cru and the other urban wineries down in London. We’ve got a unit in an industrial estate in Gateshead.

I can see trees from the window, so it’s not totally industrialised; we are about five minutes from the countryside.

We decided to set up and some second-hand equipment. We’ve got tanks a press, and some other equipment as well. We did our first vintage in 2018.

If you remember, that summer was incredible, and we actually bought our grapes from Leicestershire. It surprises a lot of people that there are grapes grown even that far north.

What styles of wine did you set out to make?

We made five wines and it was always my aim to start off with still wines, just purely for financial reasons. I always wanted to make Bacchus because I knew it was a wine that would convert the most normal, everyday wine drinkers to an English wine because of its similarities with Sauvignon Blanc.

We made our first Bacchus and it got some bronze medals last year, which was a massive surprise. In 2019, we got our grapes from Gloucestershire and Herefordshire.

Fortnum and Mason were doing this big tasting of lots of English wines from different wineries. They tasted a few of ours including our 2018 Bacchus and they asked for a sample of the 2019 in January and it went from there. They had narrowed it down, wanting our Bacchus as their Fortnum & Mason Bacchus.

This year we also launched our first red wine, made with Regent grapes. We make a carbonated white wine, inspired by the fizzy Bacchus that Chapel Down make which has gone really well for them.

All of our winemaking at the moment is based on affordability of equipment but that’s worked well because people really like it.

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You promote your business really well; is that a conscious decision to focus on PR?

I use an online marketing agency and Lucy who does all that for us, although she has her own company, she’s almost like a staff member. I did everything to begin with and she’s owned it all and made it a bit more professional. She’s very experienced with Instagram; she’s quite young and grew up with social media.

I try to take the opportunities where I can though to promote our business. I think we are slightly different so there is a quirk there that makes it interesting for people. But I also think wine is a really competitive arena and especially English wine.

It’s a little bit more expensive than people would ordinarily pay for wine, so that idea of making sure you can reach as many customers as possible is really important. I’ve just commissioned a bit of market research this week to make sure we’re reaching the right people. It all helps.

Do you plan to grow the business?

I’ve got one employee at the moment, Liam. I employed him last year and in an assistant winemaker role. Anything else, when there’s any bottling, I get friends and family to help us out.

We’re trying to grow and I started a crowdfunder in August, to try and raise some money to expand the business. I felt like it was a good time because of the publicity we have been getting for the Fortnum & Mason wine. It’s so difficult to expand production when you’ve got to buy all the grapes and then you don’t sell the wine until next year or the year after.

Was it a proud moment to be labelling your wine as Fortnum & Mason?

It was incredible, I couldn’t believe it. Fenwicks were our first stockist and I thought that was amazing when they stocked our Rosé last year.

This is an absolute step up from that; we’re actually providing somebody their own label wine. Speaking to Jamie, who is the buyer at Fortnum’s, he said they really liked the wine but also the story. We think of the business as an old English tradition but it also likes to do something a bit different.

When I lived in London I loved to go in at Christmas and see what I could get as treats and gifts for people. I can’t wait to get down and look at it in the shop.

What did you want to achieve when you set up the winery?

I was very open-minded to the wine we’d make and for who it would be.

Thinking about it purely from a winemaker's point of view, I thought it would just be our labels. I certainly didn’t think I’d be making wine for supermarkets because I don’t think that’s the right market for us or the right margin. Maybe when we’re a bit bigger, but we make 9,000 bottles a year at the moment and I’m trying to get up to 30,000. That’s probably the capacity for the building we’re in at the moment, but that’s still not very much. I think we might do some contract winemaking but I always thought we might move the winery to a more central location, have a bit more of a destination with winery tours.

I think it’s good to build your name slowly and not a big bang of rushing into lots of different things, but this Fortnum & Mason deal is hopefully going to make people want to invest in the future.

How do you choose where you’re going to get your grapes from?

With the Leicestershire vineyard, it was a bit of fortune. Somebody reached out through the WineGB Midlands and North group saying that they wanted to sell their grapes and immediately I said I was interested in that. Last year I sent an email out to all of WineGB, the whole industry forum, and I got back so many replies. I think I was offered 250 tonnes and I wanted 10. I thought it was amazing and it opened my eyes to how much is available out there. Then this year, I used the relationships I’d already built to find out who was selling. There are a lot of vineyards that sell every year. There are some that make their own wine in some years. What I’m hoping to do is build an ongoing relationship when it’s been a successful wine. Knowing and meeting that vineyard team is so important though, learning that they are the experts in viticulture and trusting them.

Is there something particular you are looking for in your wines?

Our ethos is to let the grapes tell the story as much as they can. We try not to intervene too much with the natural side of it. That’s why Bacchus works so well because it grows so well in this country; you don’t need to mess about with it too much. You don’t need to deacidify it and I don’t really want to do things like that. Fortunately, we haven’t had to use fining on it either, it’s been protein stable the last two years. Mainly what I want, for the Bacchus, is to bring out as much of the fruity and elderflower characteristics as you can get from it.

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WINE REVIEWS

Throwing out the rule book

Mat h e w es Juk

Rule breakers are starting from a blank page and creating wonders, says Ma‫﬙‬hew Jukes.  www.matthewjukes.com paper-plane, vineyard.ed@kelsey.co.uk

I have written about rebels before on this page and it sparked a fair amount of debate. I mentioned that there is nothing worse than a fake rebel and nothing more exciting and dynamic than a real one – as long as the wines stack up.

This month I am taking this non-conformist message a stage further. What happens when you genuinely throw out the rule book? When you are brave enough to have a vision, stick to it and face up to the results no matter what transpires you are a genuine trailblazer.

I would imagine that we don’t hear about many of the failures that these brave souls come up with in the pursuit of uniqueness, and while some may be

drinkable, others will, inevitably, be far from it.

It is very easy to follow convention, we see it in every walk of life, but ‘disruptors’, as these mavericks are called these days, have not just thrown out their rule books, they have built bonfires with them!

Over the summer, I found three wines in quick succession which were all so remarkable and so unconventional that they won me over and inspired the theme behind this month’s column. I cannot wait to discover more wines like these because they offer keen tasters the unexpected and the unexpected, in the wine world, is the magic that binds our business together and keeps us coming back for more.

Love English and Welsh wine?

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AU G U S T 2020 | V I N E YA R D

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MATTHEW JUKES I don’t know Castlewood owner Rob Corbett personally but part of me wants to think that he had never tasted the Bacchus grape before and so there was no existing template in his wine brain when he, visionary hotelier Robin Hutson and renowned chef Mark Hix set about a plan to make Devon Minnow.

You can read more about this sparkling specialist estate and the story of this spinning lure-inspired wine on Rob’s website. What I want to focus on is his complete disregard for the Bacchus rulebook!

This is not a run-of-the-mill, skinny, lean, cat’s pee-soaked, nettle and grass cuttings-drenched wine. Instead, it is a ravishing beauty which defies belief! The grapes were hand-selected and then whole bunch pressed into oak barrels for fermentation and a further six months of maturation.

The texture alone is worthy of applause and the subtle oak employed is a slice of sheer heaven. No expense has been spared here and it tastes like it.

I advise everyone in the land to drink this wine as it will reconfigure the Bacchus landscape forever. You can drink this staggering creation in Robin’s Pig Hotels and Lime Wood, Angela Hartnett’s Murano, The Oyster & Fish House in Lyme Regis and also Mitch Tonks’ wonderful The Seahorse in Dartmouth.

2018 Castlewood, Devon Minnow, Block HH Clone Gf1 Bacchus, Devon £24.00, bottle £50.00, magnum www.castlewoodvineyard.co.uk

2019 Fortnum & Mason Bacchus, Laneberg Winery Gateshead £15.95 www.fortnumandmason.com

So if you are the country’s most famous, upmarket gifts, hampers, wine, tea and food shop and you would like to procure a ‘traditionally shaped’ (I must write this because of Devon Minnow), own-label Bacchus you would imagine that there is a very familiar posse of wineries to contact.

But no, F&M threw the Bacchus rulebook out of the window and gave young gun winemaker Elise Lane a chance to show off her skills. This was an inspired decision! Laneberg Wine is the first on Tyneside and the furthest north in England, based in Gateshead. What! Is this a typo? After dabbling in WSET, acing Plumpton and continuing her fascination with chemistry she returned to the north to make south-smashing wines. There are no tricks employed in the winery but what Elise manages to do, with laser-sighted precision, is to retain all of the pristine energy in the grapes, which were sourced from the Poulton Hill Vineyard in Gloucestershire.

The result is an 11% alc, rapier-sharp, elderflower and green tea perfumed wine which goosebumped my entire body with the very first sip! It is a deliriously refreshing wine and one which will mean that Bacchus’s rule book may never get another look!

I have never been truly bitten by the Denbies bug, but they do make a rather nice sweetie called Noble Harvest.

So it is worth admitting that I approached this unlabelled, pre-release sample without much optimism. It just goes to show that one should taste every wine with a completely open mind because this is a stormer. Denbies has thrown the Pinot Noir rule book out of the window because this doesn’t look much like any Pinot I have tasted before, but it does look like a punchy, testosterone-fuelled Dolcetto, with its bitter cherry and dark chocolate attack. I don’t care in the slightest that there is little formal PN DNA on show here because this is a delightful and extremely rewarding red wine. It manages to wear 17 months in older French barriques with ease and this only adds to the swagger that this challenging red brings to its delivery.

The fact that it is only 12.5% alcohol is baffling because there is intensity here, too.

Good on you Denbies for making an energetic, feisty Pinot which will amaze all-comers. This wine goes on release in early September, so this write up is perfectly timed, too!

2018 Denbies, Pinot Noir £18.95 www.denbies.co.uk

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25

EDITOR'S VISIT

lin or Ed it

Working from home

ecca Ch ap Reb

In a time when so many people are shiſting from office life to remote working, Nichola and Jonathan Kelsey have the ultimate work from home gig.

Almost the entire garden, is well established vineyard that they took over when they bought the property three years ago. Named after its location in the Welcombe Hills, Stratford-upon-Avon, the land was previously farmed by Shakespeare’s family.

This has been their starting point for a collection of wines named after Shakespeare’s plays, characters or even famous quotes, building on the history of the area and the vineyard itself.

The vineyard does have a tragic backstory, though, that fits in almost poetically with its Shakespearean roots. Previously a fruit farm, it was setup as a passion project by Chris Gallimore in 2001, something that was supposed to be a retirement project.

Jonathan explained the story: “We bought the property three years ago.

A gentleman set up the vineyard in 2001 as a retirement dream. He bought two cottages and put them together. It was part of an old fruit farm, so he grubbed up the land, planted Pinot Noir and Bacchus, which are our oldest

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vines up top, and then slowly just put more and more in. He took it up to 2.5 acres and 2,500 vines. It was a bit tragic really because he only enjoyed it for a few years before passing away.

“It was contract farmed for a few years before we bought it. It was all set up ready for us to go, but unfortunately it was someone’s retirement dream that didn’t play out.”

However, Welcombe Hills Vineyard is now filled with a family who are able to put the passion into it as first planned, as well as their own personal stamp through the wines they make and tours they host. The heritage of the site is clear to see when you walk the well-established vines and see the red brick cottage, and both its recent history and distant past have made an impression on visitors over the years.

EDITOR'S VISIT “It was really nice, on our tour last week, there was a chap who came and Nichola added: “We’ve started using the space for vineyard activities, had known Chris who planted it,” said Nichola. “He let on halfway through the although it’s not been a tasting room this year – it’s just been a room and tour that he remembers Chris planning this and planting that, and he said he all the tastings have been outside. It’s been so handy that it’s just ready to would have been very happy with what we’ve done and that it carried on.” go, though.”

“Back in 2010 it was stocked in Waitrose, and we had someone on the Jonathan’s background is in branding and marketing, while Nichola runs tour not long ago who used to work for a wine merchant and he came her own events company, giving them the right skills to communicate their here and said “I’ve been here before”, but had completely forgotten. He’d produce to customers. Although they both have day jobs, they’ve taken on been here wine tasting back in 2010 or 2011. It’s been in the Savoy and the the bulk of the daily work in the vineyard with some outsourced help for Houses of Parliament, too.” the biggest jobs.

As Nichola mentioned, the wines from this pocket of land had already Jonathan said “I’ve got a full-time job and Nichola runs an events found some success so the name Welcombe Hills might already be familiar. company as well, so we do a mixture, a lot of the menial work I can do” Having an established vineyard has allowed her and Jonathan to really hit however with the big jobs like winter pruning, bud rubbing and leaf the ground running, with their first vintage released last year. stripping Jonathan has help “there’s a big fruit company up here called “A job moved me up here, and we spent ages trying to find the right Fruitful Jobs and they do quite a few of the vineyards that are further house,” said Jonathan. “We didn’t necessarily have a vineyard in mind, north” he said. but we found the house and fell in love with it and the views.

Nichola said: “It’s overseen by Jon but the bigger jobs would take us “We wanted a business alongside the property we bought and weeks to do, it’s far more cost effective to get them in to smash it in this came ready packaged. It had the vineyard ready to go, a day. It’s just a fantastic industry to be part of really. Everyone it had a marketing agency renting the space up top, but is so helpful and supportive of what you’re doing.”

"Named effectively it was a tasting room ready to go as well. So “We are so grateful that so many people have been aſter its location in basically, we had a business that had never really happy to help us. For example, the founder of >> been a business.”

Halfpenny Green, Martin Vickers, comes the Welcombe Hills on

land previously farmed

by Shakespeare’s family.”

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

27

EDITOR'S VISIT << down quite regularly just to walk the vines with me and talk through where we might need to do some extra work,” adds Jonathan.

“The first bottle we came up with was the Ophelia, two years before the sparkling. We loved it and just for consistency wanted to carry it through with the branding. We produce the labels ourselves – so Ophelia was our proudest moment because I loved that label. It’s pretty much ours and that’s what we wanted from the start because the branding side is the one part where we can really add value at the moment.

“We did have a little bit of help at the start with the initial rebranding of the logo, some of the fonts. From there we’ve been left to play with it.

“It’s Shakespeare’s land though, so the branding felt natural. Snitterfield, the village we are in has still got Propero’s Barn from the Tempest and other connections. Shakespeare is sort of all around us, that was a very easy link, and then there is a great quote from the play Henry VIII: ‘Good company, good wine, good welcome can make good people’. That all played into it.”

It’s a plot – the location kind, not a scripted one – that people

might consider hobbyist by its size, but its layout is also a little unconventional. It was planted with a wide range of varieties.

There are a few experimental vines in very small numbers.

This has meant Welcombe Hills could produce four different wines from the off, which they are looking to expand.

“Back when the Pinot Noir was originally planted, it was one of the most northerly vineyards in England. He experimented with a lot of German grapes, so we’ve got Bacchus here, Dornfelder, a row of 45 Kerners, which doesn’t really help us do very much with it," jokes Jonathan.

“We’ve got a Pinot Precoce, that is early ripening alongside some more traditional ones; Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and a variety called Auxerrois from the Alsace region.

"Out there they blend it with Pinot Blanc, but it’s a sibling of Chardonnay so we tend to use the Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Auxerrois within our sparkling. It doesn’t help us because we don’t get up to a big weight of individual grape but there’s lots of different varieties we can play with

"The branding side is the one part where we can really add value.”

> Nichola and Jonathan Kelsey

28

EDITOR'S VISIT depending on the season.

“They had set up different trellising systems and it hadn’t worked, it’s quite a hilly site here, and it’s quite windy, so then they infilled every other row with a different variety, just to try and bring a weight of grape up. They were effectively aiming for a tonne of each of the main varieties.”

There is still, says the Kelseys, shock from some people when they discover they’re growing grapes in Stratford-upon-Avon but as Jonathan explains, here at the top of the hills they have their own microclimate.

“This is the top of Welcombe Hills. You can’t see it from here but there’s a big monument behind the trees there, that’s effectively seen as the top of Welcombe Hills but this is actually the highest point.

“This is really quite a special microclimate. We get warmth from the sun on this site from very early in the morning. We’re pretty much uninterrupted from sunrise and it just gets backed for the whole year, which is great.

“Not as good as some, and it can be really frustrating when you look at some of the vineyards in the south of England and they are three weeks ahead of you in terms of picking or veraision. I’ve got an aunt and uncle out in the Languedoc region and they’ve just finished picking out there. You suddenly realise how far ahead the seasons are out there,” he said.

“I feel quite lucky with the varieties we can grow here too. We’ve got Sauvignon Blanc, which is quite rare around here, it’s quite rare in the UK in general. We didn’t quite get it right last year but we’ve blended it with the Bacchus, just to help. The Pinot tends to go towards sparkling and the Pinot Precoce gives us the opportunity to do red. I think having lots of different varieties gives us lots of different opportunities to play around with.”

Welcombe Hills now has the Ophelia English Sparkling Wine, the Tempest Bacchus, Twelfth Night Sauvignon Blanc and Bacchus and a Rosé called 'A rose by any other name’.

The local community has had a fantastic response to the pair taking over the vineyard – with many not even realising it was there. >>

"This is really quite a special microclimate.”

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

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EDITOR'S VISIT

30

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

EDITOR'S VISIT << It is tucked out of the way, so it’s hard to imagine from the road that hidden behind their home is a commercial vineyard.

“Everyone is fascinated locally. Even in our village, the first year we had our vintage, we went to the village fête because that’s what you do to test it out, perhaps 90% of people never knew there was a vineyard in the village. Mainly because, even when Chris the original owner had it, they weren’t going after this big commercial enterprise and it wasn’t under its own label for so long that people just didn’t know anything about it. There’s a fascination, definitely,” said Jonathan.

“Even around here, people say they have got no idea there is a vineyard in Stratford-uponAvon,” Nichola said. “And then they say that they didn’t even know you could grow wine this far north, and we point out that some people actually grow vines in Scotland. Our friends have been very interested in following our journey as well.”

Looking at the vineyard now, it looks idyllic with the country cottage, their children running between the vines – and apparently picking more grapes than the birds – and the beautiful rolling hills of the Warwickshire countryside.

It’s not all been smooth sailing though, and although the biggest challenges to get the vineyard back to its healthiest state appear almost over, Jonathan admits that living where you work can mean the work is never done.

“This is part of the problem – our bedroom window looks down on the vineyard, so you pretty much open it up and know what work is left to do,” Jonathan laughs.

“Getting this back to health has been really fun because that will really increase our yield and when you stare out of the window bit by bit you can see the rows improving. We can see it all progressing.”

“It’s taken two or three years of tending to them, green harvesting, and taking the flowers off so all the energy is going back into the vine and they are coming out healthy. They’re getting there now; another year and I think they’ll be in a really good place.

"We’ve had a little bit of disease here but I think we’ve just managed to halt it. Our challenge at the moment is a bit of powdery mildew.

“We feel very lucky because a few nearby

vineyards lost almost everything if not everything in the late frost but we survived.

When Martin came down from Halfpenny and just walked and saw what we had, he couldn’t believe it because they had quite a big hit as well.

“I think it was partly luck and partly we had just ploughed up every row and trimmed everything. I think where you’ve got bare earth you get another two or three degrees of temperature.

Also the River Avon is at the bottom and much further down the hill. Where we are right at the top of the hill, frost tends to keep going downhill, so we would expect the bottom patch to be the worst hit but it didn’t really seem to be. I think it’s because we had no grass around the vines and the frost kept rolling down the hill.”

I ask them if they ever look at the quirks of the vineyard and wish they’d started from a blank page themselves?

“We’re going to find that out,” said Jonathan.

“Next year we’ve got 2.5 acres ready to go.

Because we’re beginning to get the production and sales that we need, we are hopefully going to plant in March next year.

“That’s going to be the first time that we are not just putting our own stamp on it, but deciding what sort of grape varieties and what we want to do. We love the Bacchus, and that’s been our best seller by far, and Pinot Noir, because it’s grown really well up here. We’ve got our first red, last time we made a red up here was 2014 and that’s coming back soon.

“We had a couple of bottles back to taste at the weekend, it’s aging in oak barrels at the moment but we are hoping to release that in the next couple of months. That’s quite exciting.

Everyone seems to ask us for red because it’s the one thing we don’t have!

“Potentially there’s a grape variety called Divico that we might plant too, which is in trial at the moment at a few vineyards. It’s supposed to produce this really deep red and its disease resistant so we’re considering that as an option. We’ll taste it and see if it’s wine that we like."

It’s been a slow and steady return to form.

The pair explained that in 2013 Kieron Atkinson, who contract farmed the land at the time, took close to six tonnes of good quality grapes from the land and they have >>

"We love the Bacchus, and that’s been our best seller by far.”

"Potentially there’s a grape variety called Divico that we might plant.”

Photos © Sally Crane Photography

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

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<< yet to achieve this yield.

Jonathan said: “We’re building up. When we came in, it had been slightly overworked.

That’s partly why we took it over. I think the last season they only took 500kg off the whole vineyard. In 2018 we took just over two tonnes and made 1900 bottles, but last year we were about three tonnes, and this year we’re aiming for about four to five tonnes.

“I think at full yield it goes to 5,000 to 6,000 bottles. There’s about a third of the vineyard down below that we haven’t taken any grapes from, so about 800 vines we haven’t taken any

32

grapes from and we’ve just been getting them back to health.”

Nichola added: “You can really see the difference in the grapes this year. Kieron Atkinson from the English Wine Project, he contract farmed here for a couple of years, and even he commented on how good the Chardonnay grapes were looking and he was really pleased to see they were coming back to health.”

Despite the strange times the industry has been seeing, the popularity of Welcombe Hills is shining through. Jonathan and Nichola are

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

still recovering from a recent weekend of tours that saw 100 people visit, they’re running low on some wines and already 60 people have signed up to help them at harvest later this year.

If nothing else, the Kelsey’s have certainly proved ‘good company, good wine, good welcome can make good people.’ However, with two silver and one bronze award for the vineyard in the WineGB awards that have just been announced, it’s clear good people, good company and good Welcombe can also make good wine.

EDITOR'S VISIT

Smaller vineyards growing Halfpenny Green Halfpenny Green Wine Estate has been making wine for Jonathan and Nichola at Welcombe Hills Vineyard since they took it over, but working with smaller sites like this isn’t unusual for the winery.

Clive Vickers, managing director of Halfpenny Green, said: “Incredibly now, including some small hobby ones, we’re making wine for about 55 vineyards. The contract winemaking is just growing and growing.

“We produce ourselves on 30 acres, and we have vineyards of around 10 to 15 acres down to some with half an acre.”

Clive explained that they noted that it would be difficult for these smaller vineyards to find anyone who would take small batches and catering for this group has paid off. “We took the view a few years ago that it was always going to be difficult for small vineyards or vineyards that have just been planted that would get bigger over time,” he said.

“We set our stall out to do that by putting in the facilities in the winery to make small batches. We’ve got lots of 10,000 litres tanks but we’ve got lots of around 300 to 500 litre tanks, as well. That means we can press half a tonne if someone needs it and they still get their own tank.

Halfpenny Green Wine Estate has recently expanded its winery by 8,000sqft to cater for more contracts, with 64 new tanks installed to deal with the growth over the last 18 months.

“We try to listen to what the vineyard wants and manage their expectations. When we first meet someone for winemaking, we talk to them about their sales strategy, the area they’ll be hitting, whether they’re onsite sales or not. Then we can think about creating wines for them that suit what they’re doing,” Clive added.

“We don’t limit them to two tastings a year or anything like that, they can call in anything,

walk in the winery, see us filtering their wine.

We keep them involved all the way along and they can see the journey their wines are going on.”

Talking about Welcombe Hills, Clive revealed that they had known of the site since before, the new ownership but were impressed by what the Kelseys had done.

He said: “It’s a very productive vineyard.

We’ve known four sets of people managing that vineyard and made wine for them all, including Jonathan and Nichola. I do know it quite well and my father, Martyn, calls in quite regularly. He goes out to our contracts and make sure they make the most of it, we throw that in if people are making wine with us.

“They were quite forward thinking with Sauvignon Blanc on that site, ahead of a lot of other people trying different varieties out, and they’ve produced very good grapes over the years.”

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PROPERTY

Oldest organic UK vineyard comes to market Sedlescombe Organic Vineyard goes on sale with 16 acres, modern visitors centre, tasting bar and bistro.

ROBERTSBRIDGE

| EAST SUSSEX

The oldest organic and biodynamic vineyard in the UK has come to the market in East Sussex.

Sedlescombe Organic Vineyard was established in 1979 and extends to 16 acres, with a contemporary style visitor centre incorporating a shop, tasting bar and bistro.

There are about seven acres under vine, including Regent, Solaris and Monarch, as well as 2.5 acres of Pinot Noir, which were planted in 2018.

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£1.95M

16 ACRE

The wine is currently made off-site however there is an open-plan room to the rear of the building which is fully set up with services to accommodate wine making equipment. There are two clay amphoras, which are popular for the fermentation or ageing of the wine.

Beyond the visitors centre is an area of woodland with nature trail and a south facing, three-bedroom timber framed chalet bungalow, subject to an agricultural occupancy condition, which was built in 1987 to low

energy use specification.

Chris Spofforth, head of Savills viticulture, said: “Sedlescombe Organic Vineyard offers an excellent opportunity for a new entrant into the rapidly expanding English wine industry.

Whilst well-established with a fresh brand and a ‘wow-factor’ visitor facility, this respected organic wine estate has potential for further expansion.”

Sedlescombe Organic Vineyard is being marketed by Savills with a guide price of £1,950,000.

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AGRONOMY

Rob S

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Agronomy diary

Ch

Building next year’s potential One area that often gets overlooked amidst the hectic workloads on vineyards at this time of year is the potential to use post-harvest nutrition to improve the winter hardiness of vines and build next season’s yield potential.

The nature of cool climate wine growing

per Coo

36

the wide range of growth stages and crop maturity caused by May’s late frosts, which is complicating picking decisions in affected vineyards. Finding that optimum balance between the specific sweetness and acidity required by winemakers is always tricky, never more so than in years like this.

There are a number of nutritional products on the market, such as Lallemand’s Pro-Precocity, that can help boost grape quality, strengthen skins and promote even ripening, which may be worth considering, where crops are more variable.

Pre-harvest applications of the foliar potassium products such as Solupotasse or Potassium metalosate are beneficial as potassium has an important influence on sugar concentration and skin colour.

Downy mildew becomes the key foliar disease as harvest approaches and the weather turns wetter. The best protectants either have a harvest interval of at least 28 days, or a latest application timing expressed as “berries developing colour”.

So in the run up to harvest, growers must rely on softer products such as Phorce and Zynergy, to preserve leaf function; a task which is made easier if control has been excellent earlier in the season.

means that in many cases grapes are maturing as canopies begin senescing, thereby limiting the opportunities for any such post-harvest foliar nutrition. However, there may be the chance to do something on earlier maturing cultivars before leaves begin to senesce.

While some nitrogen is useful for building vine reserves before dormancy, avoid applying too much as this encourages sappy growth that is slower to lignify. Instead, focus on the micronutrients that are more commonly found to be deficient in vineyards, especially sites on chalky soils, such as magnesium, iron, zinc and boron.

Copper is another useful nutrient, as even just a small application to canes can have the useful side effect of inhibiting fungal development while the plant is lignifying, preventing stem botrytis and other pathogens from growing. For best results, apply copper with a deposit-promoting adjuvant to improve rain-fastness.

Phosphorus is also a useful post-harvest nutrient, for building root systems.

Of course, it is important to note that most UK grapes are grown on either the Guyot or ScottHenry system, which means a large amount of material will be removed when vines are cut back, so vines must have sufficient time for nutrients to be absorbed via green leaves into the main stems before pruning commences.

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r

is

Protect grape quality and rebuild reserves for next year.

With picking of early cultivars about to begin, Hutchinsons’ Rob Saunders and Chris Cooper examine how growers can protect the quality of later-maturing grapes and start rebuilding vine potential for next season.

When it comes to protecting grape yields and quality in the immediate run-up to harvest, botrytis remains the principle threat in many situations.

Disease risk is driven by several factors, not least the weather and the presence of any damage to grapes that may predispose them to infection, such as that caused by pests like SWD (see August’s article).

It is impossible to eradicate these risks, especially as initial infection could have occurred many weeks ago during flowering, with latent disease only now showing itself. Later infection risk increases further where swollen berries rupture, allowing mould to develop on split skins.

While latent infection cannot be undone, we can stop botrytis from spreading to other bunches, and this year there is a welcome addition to the armoury in the form of a new biological fungicide.

Botector contains two strains of the yeast-like fungus Aureobasidium pullulans, which reduces disease incidence by competing with botrytis pathogens for nutrients and space. Importantly, the product offers just a one day harvest interval, giving a much better opportunity to protect crops right up to harvest.

If the product lives up to expectations, it offers an exciting alternative to more traditional botrytis fungicide treatments, many of which require longer harvest intervals.

Any extra flexibility is welcome this year given

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Darcy G

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The vine post

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Working with the GLAA at harvest 2020.

This year’s harvest looks to be an even more challenging affair than normal with the added complications of Covid-19 and the risks to workers. For most vineyards this is the time of highest demand for staff and a large proportion of pickers will be seasonal workers supplied via viticultural contractors like Vine Works. Growers clearly need to know that the staff they are supplied with are reliable, hardworking, healthy and have the right to work in the UK, so sourcing should always be via a GLAA licensed provider.

There are several licensed providers working in the viticultural sector, the largest are ourselves at Vine Works and Vine Care, both companies have been licensed labour providers since 2009. To achieve licensed status, companies are audited by the GLAA to ensure compliance with a detailed legal criteria.

Vine Works have always had a positive working relationship with the GLAA and have found them to be friendly, helpful and responsive to enquiries. We’d recommend that anyone with any questions on the compliance of labour providers or concerns about staff welfare contact the regional GLAA representative.

GLAA Senior Investigating Officer Jennifer Baines said: “We are coming towards a crucial part of the year in the agricultural sector and this means it’s more important than ever for businesses to be vigilant in identifying the signs of labour exploitation. Are workers being paid what they deserve?

How long are they working for and are they getting breaks? Are they unfamiliar with their surroundings and acting as if they are controlled by someone else? These are just a few of the many signs to look out for in spotting labour abuse.

“Working with compliant businesses to drive up industry standards is critical in helping to protect vulnerable workers and tackling those who operate outside of our regulations. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, our investigators have been visiting everything from vineyards

to packing factories to check on the welfare of workers and ensure that businesses have the support they need during these unprecedented times.

These welfare and visibility checks are ongoing across the south of England alongside our day-to-day business of safeguarding vulnerable workers from exploitation.

We would encourage anyone who suspects someone is being exploited for their labour to get in touch with our intelligence team, either by calling 0800 4320 804 or emailing intelligence@gla.gov.uk. Your call could help put an end to serious labour abuse and ensure that some of the most vulnerable and hidden members of our society are able to rebuild their lives free from exploitation.”

Alongside the legislative compliance body of the GLAA, companies like ourselves working for best practice in the labour providing sector work with organisations such as Stronger2gether. Stronger2gether is a multistakeholder body of companies and labour providers that encourage training and awareness of worker exploitation in the supply chain and aims to eradicate associated problems ensuring consumers’ confidence of end products. Look out for the logo to ensure the highest level of practice standards with your labour supplier.

Harvest is clearly the time of highest demand for seasonal workers and a large proportion will come to the UK for this part of the season only. In this time of global pandemic we need to ensure that all staff coming from countries with a high Covid-19 reproduction rate comply with government quarantine regulations. To guarantee this labour providers should ensure that staff are either currently working in the UK, coming from countries with no quarantine restrictions or will have been through the two weeks quarantine period. Vine Works can guarantee that all of our staff will be currently residing in the UK or will have been through two weeks isolation.

See WineGB bulletin 4/8/20 Wishing everyone a bountiful upcoming harvest.

 www.vine-works.com paper-plane, sales@vine-works.com  01273 891777 S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

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ns t io ra Ma nager

Representing you

Cowderoy Op o e J

Working in partnership with Vineyard Magazine for a developing UK wine industry.

WineGB is the national trade body representing the vine growers and winemakers of Great Britain from the largest producers to small hobbyists.

Our members work together with the organisation to develop strategy, expertise and marketing opportunities for long-term, sustainable success.

If you are interested in wine production in the UK find out more about WineGB and join us. Visit our website www.winegb.co.uk

◆ Albury Organic Vineyard, Surrey

Sustainable Wines of Great Britain announce first accredited producers The first vineyards and wineries to formally achieve recognition for their sustainable credentials under the industry’s environmental sustainability scheme are now announced.

Thirteen producers have received Sustainable Wines of Great Britain (SWGB) certification. They range from boutique vineyards to major wine producers, plus a contract winery operation.

Other producers are currently undergoing the auditing process and will receive their certification in the near future. The original 30 Founder Members of the Scheme between them account for some 40% of the total hectarage under vine in the UK, with a production capability of around 6.8 million bottles.

The Scheme’s sustainability objectives are promoted through guidelines, which encourage best practice and establish standards in both the

◆ Bee Tree Vineyard, West Sussex ◆ Camel Valley Vineyard & Winery,

Cornwall ◆ Chilworth Manor Vineyard,

Surrey ◆ Defined Wine Ltd, Kent ◆ Easing Hill Vineyard,

Worcestershire ◆ Grange Estate Vineyard,

Hampshire vineyard and winery. These can be found on the WineGB website.

Chris Foss chairs the industry working group behind SWGB and commented: “We are delighted to welcome the first fully accredited producers, and there are many others not far behind. Sustainability credentials bring real value not only to individual producers but underpin the overall industry values.”

◆ High Clandon Estate Vineyard,

Surrey ◆ Hush Heath Estate Vineyard, Kent ◆ Nyetimber Vineyard, Sussex ◆ Three Choirs Vineyard & Winery,

Gloucestershire ◆ Venn Valley Vineyard, Devon ◆ Yotes Court Vineyard, Kent

WineGB welcomes new partner

WineGB is delighted to welcome Brewin Dolphin as a new industry partner.

“This will be a huge benefit for both organisations and WineGB looks forward to working alongside Brewin Dolphin,” said Peter Gladwin, WineGB Vice Chair.

Simon Blowey, Regional Managing Director, Brewin Dolphin, said: “We are very pleased to sponsor Wines of Great Britain as its industry partner for wealth management. We look forward to working closely with WineGB’s members to offer them help and advice to meet their financial aspirations, and we also look forward to promoting the burgeoning UK wine industry to a wider audience.”

Brewin Dolphin has been helping people to meet their financial goals and fulfil their aspirations for over 250 years. Founded in 1762 Brewin Dolphin is one of the UK’s largest wealth managers offering personalised

financial planning and investment management advice to individuals, charities, trusts, institutions and financial intermediaries.

With offices across the UK, Channel Islands and the Republic of Ireland, whatever your plans for life Brewin Dolphin can help you achieve them. Generating an income, funding a personal passion, planning for retirement: first investment will always be in understanding your priorities and building a personal relationship with you. The value of investments and any income from them can fall and you may get back less than you invested. Please visit the Brewin Dolphin website (www.brewin.co.uk).

JOIN WINEGB

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S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

You are invited to attend the WIN EGB AWA RDS 2020 VIRT UAL CER

EMO NY on TUE SDAY 8 SEPT EMB ER 2020 AT 12 NOO N hosted by

and featuring our

PETE R RICH ARD S MW Judges Susie Barri

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RSVP via the follow www.eventbrite.c

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Palmer

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We are celebrating the culmination of this year’s WineGB Awards in style! Please join us for our Virtual Awards Ceremony to celebrate the 2020 WineGB Awards and to unveil the trophy winners – taking place at noon on Tuesday 8 September.

In place of our usual Awards ceremony in London, we are staging this industry celebration online. The 30-minute event will include

interviews with our fantastic judges: co-chairs Susie Barrie MW and Oz Clarke OBE, together with Rebecca Palmer of Corney & Barrow.

Our Master of Ceremonies, writer and broadcaster Peter Richards MW, will navigate you through the event, which will include interviews with our judges and the all-important announcements of our top winners.

The ceremony will last approximately 30 minutes and is free to attend. Please visit the WineGB Awards page on www.winegb.co.uk for more details and links.

2020

WineGB Awards trophy presentations 8 September

‘Entry into viticulture’ call for interest from potential employers In order to help boost the workforce, Plumpton College are providing a free intensive one-week skills development course aimed at individuals looking for a career change, or those who have recently been made redundant.

The programme starts on 7 September and will cover topics such as first aid at work, health and safety, tractor driving, operative training and some viticulture skills, giving job seekers the necessary basic skills the industry is asking for. To find out more or to register your interest in providing paid employment or a placement to those coming through the programme, please call Dan Karlsson on 01273 892127 to find out how to be involved or email business@plumpton.ac.uk

Seasonal workers coming to UK vineyards: guidelines The Government has provided advice for seasonal agricultural workers coming to England to pick fruit, and for their employers, which can be found on the Gov.uk website. We would like all vineyards and wine producers to be aware that all seasonal agricultural workers coming to the UK from a country which is not exempt from quarantine must self-isolate for 14 days prior to starting work on a farm or vineyard – currently this will include workers travelling from Romania, Bulgaria, France and Spain. This list is subject to change so please

check the Government website for countries that are exempt from the 14-day quarantine rules.

Vine Care UK, WineGB Silver Patron, has implemented a number of measures for this harvest to reduce risk. It is important that all measures are fully understood by both parties so that the harvest operation can go as smoothly as possible and, for a safe and successful harvest. These measures from Vine Care UK can be found on the WineGB website in the Covid-19 section (accessed via the home page). WineGB is also running webinars on preparing for harvest in the winery and vineyard. The recordings of these can be found on the WineGB website.

FORTHCOMING WEBINARS

We will soon be publishing our forthcoming programme of webinars covering business and marketing, winemaking and viticulture.

If you have missed any of the WineGB series of webinars, then please visit the website for the recordings.

24 September, 6pm: Winemaking Surgery #1 First peer to peer session with winemakers to discuss issues during harvest

15 October, 6pm: Winemaking Surgery #2 Second peer to peer session with winemakers to discuss issues during harvest

28 October, 6pm: Managing MLF With Brad Greatrix, Winemaker, Nyetimber Vineyards

12 November, 6pm: Filtration and Stabilising Details of all webinars, plus the speaker profiles, the registration links and past webinar recordings can be found on the WineGB website.

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AGRONOMY

Fact file: Crop protection Vineyard Magazine finds out from Gusbourne about how they protect their vines from pests and diseases.

When it comes to crop protection do you use any particular equipment and why do you prefer that?

We follow a conventional spray programme of preventative spraying. We use the Lipco recycling tunnel sprayer. Since the very early days of Gusbourne we have used Lipco sprayers.

They have worked very well for us over the years in maintaining a clean canopy and crop.

Are you exposed to any pests or diseases because of your location?

Jon Pollard, chief vineyard manager at Gusbourne Have you learnt any lessons from diseases hitting your vines before?

Manipulating the crop load in heavy years can pay dividends when it comes to delaying the onset of botrytis. Thinning the congested areas and allowing maximal airflow can make a real difference.

Not particularly. We spend a lot of time on canopy management and both of our sites (Kent and Sussex) have enough exposure to allow good ventilation and drying of the vineyards.

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S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

What would be your best piece of advice for those new to viticulture when it comes to crop protection?

Read as much information as you can lay your hands on. Talk to as many people as you can who have more experience than yourself. Try new things, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just presume that those who have gone before perfected the best strategies.

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Yeast and nutrition

nitrogen.FOCUS // YEAST NUTRITION EASTMonitoring NUTRITION

Factors affecting amino acid accumulation of yeast biomass needed to successfully in berries are broad; cultivar, rootstock, soil achieve a thorough breakdown of the sugars management (in particular pH), climate, the demand during alcoholic fermentation.

Although, the for yeast nitrogen disease pressure, mineral nutrition and yeast biomass must not be too excessive to

that nitrogen can be deficiency. used by 2 ripeness are all contributing factors. It can The nitrogen avoidsources an induced Saccharomyces cerevisiae are ammonium (NH4+) and be said that the yield this year is big so ◆ The nitrogen initially present in must is mino acids (organic nitrogen). They both represent 2 at can be dilution used of byYAN 2 (Yeast Assimilable Nitrogen) aassimilable rapidly assimilated during third of2 nitrogen and are present in the mustfirst at varying +) and is a lower than normal concentrations, are ammonium (NH sometimes not in sufficient quantities might be 4why there the alcoholic fermentation (d-30), at the to 2 Third ofmeet AFthe (density - 30)of the yeast. The three following 2 requirements gen). They both represent 2 in the berries available nitrogen content point when the biomass is at its highest factors must be taken into consideration: e present in as must at varying 2 a starting platform for wine makers. density.

Consequently, irrespective of • Below 150 mg N/L, must phase is deficient.

It is therefore 2 Growth phase Stationary not in sufficient quantities to 2 important to supplement with nitrogen elements.

Quality and source of supplementary the initial nitrogenitcontent, its addition he yeast. The three following 2 • Yeast nitrogen requirements depend on sugar 2 nutrition is critical to the fermentation during alcoholic fermentation (d-30) consideration: concentration. The higher this concentration, the 2 for both the yeast and the Malo lactic allows to preserve thebiomass biomass formed, greater the amount of yeast [Biomass]needed to 2 must is deficient.

It is therefore 2 below is some key fermentation.

Outlined which isachieve dependent on the yeast strain successfully a thorough breakdown of the 2 ent it with nitrogen elements. sugars during alcoholic fermentation. pointers to help decide on what nutrient and proportional to the initial Although, nitrogen the 2 yeast biomass must not be too excessive to avoid 2 ements depend on sugar sources to use; 2 concentration. an induced nitrogen deficiency.

yeast nitrogen

• The nitrogen initially present in must is rapidly 2 [Sugars] assimilated during the first third of the alcoholic 2 fermentation (d-30), at the point [Assimilable nitrogen] when the biomass 2 is at its highest density. Consequently, irrespective 2 Theinitial key nitrogen enzyme content, in the production H2S is2 of the its additionof during Fermentation time (d-30) alcoholic fermentation preserve 2 S and amino sulphate reductase.

Whenallows the H2to the biomass formed, which is dependent on the 2 acidsstrain pathways meet the sulphur amino acids2 They both represent assimilable nitrogen and yeast andand proportional to the initial nitrogen Figure 1: Assimilation of nitrogen production of biomass during must is rapidly 2 at varying concentrations, (cysteine and methionine) are produced. are present in must concentration. alcoholic fermentation. ofsometimes the alcoholic Where there is an imbalance between these not in2 sufficient quantities to meet

Sulphate reductase

pathway

Key nitrogen source

present in first third the point when the biomass 2 yeast (figure 1). The the requirements of the y. Consequently, irrespective 2 three following factors must be taken into ontent, its addition during 2 consideration: (d-30) allows to preserve 2 ◆ Below 150 mg N/L, must is deficient. It is which is dependent on the 2 therefore important to supplement it with rtional to the initial nitrogen 2

the 2 ulphate 2 H2S and 2 s meet 2 acids 2 ionine) 2 there is 2 n these 2 nitrogen 2 sors of acids 2 to an 2

Growth phase

two pathways and a nitrogen deficiency, the precursors of these sulphur amino acids are DID YOU KNOW limiting, leading to an accumulation of H2S The(Figure Amino acids key 2). enzyme in the 2

NH4 + production of H2S is sulphate 2 reductase. When the H2S and 2 nitrogen elements. amino acids pathways meet 2 supplied by adding Amino ◆ Yeast nitrogen requirements depend the Organic sulphur nitrogen amino is acids 2 (cysteine and methionine) 2 acids yeast derivatives (usually autolysed yeast). In on sugar concentration. The higher this are produced. Where there is 2 addition to amino acids, these yeast derivatives concentration, the greater the amount an imbalance between these 2 Pantothenic two pathways and a nitrogen 2 acid deficiency, the precursors of

SO42- (sulphates) these sulphur amino acids 2 SO 32- (sulphites) are limiting, leading to an 2 Amino acids accumulation of H2S.

Organic nutrient

NH4

+

SO42- (sulphates)

Amino acids

SO32- (sulphites)

Sulphite reductase

H 2S Cysteine > Figure 2

SO2

H 2S

Pantothenic acid

Methionine

Mercaptans

> Figure 1

Stationary phase

[Biomass]

[Sugars]

her this concentration, the 2 yeast biomass needed to 2 thorough breakdown of sources the 2 that can be used by The nitrogen c fermentation.

Although, the 2 Saccharomyces cerevisiae are ammonium ot be too excessive to avoid 2 (NH4 +) and amino acids (organic nitrogen). eficiency.

W

Third of AF (density - 30)

[Assimilable nitrogen]

Fermentation time

Figure 1:lipids, Assimilation of nitrogen production of biomass include vitamins andand minerals which alsoduring alcoholic fermentation. contribute to the efficient performance of the yeast. Yeast has the ability to simultaneously assimilate organic nitrogen and mineral nitrogen from the beginning of the alcoholic fermentation. Organic nitrogen must be present in order to: ◆ Limit the production of SO2 and sulphur compounds (H2S and mercaptans). ◆ Produce healthy, but not excessive, biomass.

SO42- (sulphates) ◆ Limit the risk ofSO stuck or sluggish 32- (sulphites) fermentation

SO42- (sulphates)

SO2

Organoleptic effects of organic nutrition H S 2

Numerous experiments show that improved outcomes of alcoholic fermentation can be achieved with the use of organic nitrogen.

Mercaptans SO32- (sulphites)

Even in the case of wines considered dry Sulphite reductase

(glucose + fructose < 2 g/L), small amounts of H 2S fermentable sugars can be used by degrading microorganisms and can have an adverse effect Cysteine Methionine on the quality of the wines.

Besides its effects on fermentation kinetics, the addition of organic nitrogen can increase the fruitiness of wines and limit the aromatic mask linked to the production of sulphur compounds during the alcoholic fermentation.

Except for the source of the nitrogen added, a 20 comparison of wines produced under the same conditions reveals significant preferences for wines derived from musts supplemented with Nutristart® Org. The wines are considered fruitier, fresher, less vegetal and subject to less reduction than those supplemented with minerals.

 www.BruniErben.co.uk  07805 081677 paper-plane, Mark.Crumpton@BruniErben.co.uk S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

41

GRAPE GROWING

Harvest checklist There’s more to consider than ever before for harvest 2020 and we get some expert advice on how to prepare.

This year’s harvest will be a very different one for a lot of vineyards, with Covid-19 still a high concern as confirmed cases increase again in the UK meaning precautions need to be robust for picking.

In many ways, this year has been an unusual one for vineyards, not only because of the need to rethink how they work but with the weather handing us extended periods of hot weather followed by never ending rain, seemingly on repeat since April.

With vineyards having to alter their picking plan, we have spoken to Matt Strugnell, vineyard manager at Ridgeview, and Joel Jorgensen, operations manager at Vine-Works, who has meticulously planned this year’s harvest schedule for the business, which will be ensuring that more than 90 sites are picked at the right time this year.

It’s easy to think about vines being two metres apart and consider the social distancing box is ticked, but with workers travelling to different locations or even if you're using a smaller group, there are still plenty of precautions to consider with grapes being transported from your vineyard and into the winery.

Harvest is both time-sensitive and stressful regardless of any extra pressure so, speaking to Matt and Joel, we’ve collated these things to consider – and remember – whether it’s your first harvest or not.

Get your estimates.

Talk to the winery to check how mu ch they can take.

Calculate how many workers you nee d and when.

Prepare more than enough equiptme nt.

Plan how you'll track equipment.

Talk to your contractor in advance.

Ensure your workers self-isolate for 14 days and stay in bubbles.

Prepare Covid-19 signage and facilit

ies.

Make sure lorry drivers wait for the last crate.

Get your estimates

42

Making sure your harvest runs smoothly starts way before the picking date. Matt has been working in vineyards for more than 20 years now and manages the different growers Ridgeview has. As an experienced grower, he’s got his estimates pretty well honed but he continues to develop how they can make their predictions more accurate.

He said: “The two main questions that the winery wants to know is how much is coming?

And when is it coming? That’s essentially what we’re looking at.”

Getting to these predictions requires a lot of data though, which Matt and his assistant will collect over months, as well as comparing this to historic data to understand better what may happen in the coming weeks and months.

“I go round and visit all of our growers around late flowering time, through to fruit set. So I’ve been to see them all already and we count bunches or inflorescences to work out a good average. Then we look at historic data for bunch weights and multiply all those together, to get an estimate.

“There’s quite a lot of number crunching involved so I spend a lot of time going through spreadsheets, because there is a lot of variability and it’s seeing how much variability there is likely to be within those estimates. You can do a bit of statistical analysis on it. If you go into a vineyard, you count 50 vines and count bunches on them. If you’ve got quite a wide range of counts then your average accuracy isn’t going to

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

be as good so by running a few formulas on it, you can get a percentage error.”

He explained: “Our job now is to go back and count bunches, because we might have lost some bunches, particularly to weather. We’ll go back and do a final count up soon and that gives us a final estimate. The bunches start filling out too so we can start looking at the bunch weight, and we feed all that information into the winery.”

Matt commented on how we’ve all witnessed this “strange year” that's had “periods of very hot weather right at the key stages." Each time, he’s seen the heat speed up growth only to be slowed down to nearer the normal schedule he’d predict as the colder weather follows.

GRAPE GROWING He said: “We’ve had quite a few extremes this year. Until a few days ago we’d had virtually no rain since the beginning of May, so we had a very long spell of dry weather and we’ve had a lot of days above 30 degrees as well.

“It’s been a very windy year as well, and in terms of success of flowering, there’s very much a divide between early and late flowering sites.

Early flowering sites got the good weather, later flowering sites didn’t and some haven’t set fruit as well.

It might seem like some very useful data for your winery, but these predictions are absolutely crucial when it comes to making sure you have enough workers and equipment for the days that your fruit is ready to be picked.

“Without having accurate data, and really knowing how much fruit you’ve got, you can’t make any proper plans,” says Joel. “A lot of people either get their yield estimates wrong or don’t bother counting at all, they just guess.

Actual yield calculations mean that you’ve got accurate data to work with.

“A key factor in preparing for harvest day is working with your winemaker to establish a picking regime based on the press size and yields per variety/clone.

“You work backwards from that. Based on how many grapes your winemaker can take, you then know you need to have X pickers because each picker can pick an average of 400 kilos in a

day. Then you’d go to your labour provider and say you need X pickers on this date and then you organise the right amount of auxiliary people, such as team supervisors, tractor drivers and ground crew.”

The next step, once veraison is well under way, is for Matt and his growers to start taking some samples to measure for sugar and acidity.

“We’ll ask our growers to report in weekly to start with,” he said.

“Then as we get closer to harvest those tests will become more frequent until we get to a point when they need to be picked. We can normally predict the picking date a good couple of weeks out. We have a fairly good feel for when it will happen.”

This year, Ridgeview are trialing new ways to hopefully make predictions more accurate, explained Matt.

“The bunch weight is one of the hardest things to estimate but we use historic data and compare whether they’re looking heavy or light at this stage. There can be a fairly large range depending on the vineyard and that can make a big difference to the final tonnage,” he said.

“Myself and my assistant Tom are looking at doing some berry counts on bunches this year, to see if that gives us more accuracy, and if it does give us even more accuracy then we might start asking our growers to perhaps do some berry counts.”

Simple mistakes

In the run up to the harvest both Matt and Joel explain, it’s about having everything you will need in place. Unfortunately, the most obvious and essential items can be easily forgotten – with both able to share tales of vineyards finding themselves in potentially disastrous positions because of it.

“It’s making sure you’ve got pickers, if you’re transporting fruit you need to know how many picking crates you need, how many pickers, transport arranged, believe it or not you need snips to cut the fruit off,” said Matt.

“I’ve definitely had calls in the past from people asking me last minute if I’ve got any fruit snips they can borrow. It’s one of those things that’s completely obvious and people realise they haven’t got enough.”

“There are some really simple things that can be easy to overlook, such as pallet wrap,” adds Joel.

“Forgetting that can be an absolute nightmare on harvest day when you’ve got pallets of crates, full of grapes, and without it they’re really unstable.

Something like pallet wrap can make a huge difference to your harvest day and not slow you down.”

This year Vine-Works will pick at more than 90 vineyards and that will be well over 2,000 tonnes in five weeks, Joel tells us. Working with so many different vineyards means he knows some tricks of the trade that will make a huge difference at >> harvest.

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

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GRAPE GROWING << As Matt warned, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got enough picking crates. He said: “That’s the other reason we like to get the picking forecast accurate because if you don’t put enough crates in the vineyard it can cause a few problems.”

As Joel explained, it’s not simply having enough if you’re transporting your grapes off-site – but also making sure they’re in the right place.

He said: “Have enough picking crates or bins for three days' worth of picking – not just one.

On the very first day of picking, you’re picking into batch one of crates, then those crates stay at the winery that night and the lorry comes home empty. Then on the second day you pick into batch two of crates and your lorry is loading up with those and bringing back day one’s crates. On day three, you’re picking into day three’s crates and the lorry is turning up with day two’s crates.

“A lot of people overlook this and they just get enough crates for day one or two, and actually you need three. It’s such a simple thing but so many people overlook it and end up stuck.

Without crates or bins you’re pretty much done.”

There are a few things you’ll always need more

44

of than you think, as Matt hinted at in his story about the snips and explained that disposable gloves are something they always get through lots of.

The management of the whole process is critical too, and something that is playing an even more important role when it comes to managing harvest through coronavirus times.

Joel explained: “You need enough snips for every single picker and some spares. Because you’ve always got some office staff who want to come and have a play around. The tractor driver might want to come and help or if there is any that break, you’re stuck.

“That’s also quite important anyway that you sign things in and out and number them so you know how many you’ve got, because if a pair of secateurs ended up in a picking crate – which is quite easy to do – and then that ended up in the winery press that could easily break your press in the middle of harvest, which would be an absolute disaster. Make sure your secateurs are red so you can spot them, too.

“It’s little details that people just forget. A lot of people who are new to viticulture get these

S E P T E M B E R 2020 | V I N E YA R D

things wrong because they don’t think about it in the first harvest because there is so much to think about. Those little details make a big difference.”

He added: “Then your lorry driver who’ll be taking the grapes needs to realise he’ll have to wait until the last crate is loaded. Unlike normal lorry drivers who just turn up, load up and leave, your harvest lorry driver has to wait until the last bunch of grapes has been picked. If he rocks up too early he’ll have to wait. It takes management to make sure he either turns up on time or is aware he’ll have to wait until you’ve finished picking.”

Covid-19 challenges

Ridgeview and Vine-Works will be working together on harvest, with Vine-Works supplying the labour on the day – something which is typically a careful balance to manage but Covid-19 has made even more complicated.

Joel has a tough job of calculating when to get his workers into the country, ensuring they selfisolate for 14 days and keeping these workers in bubbles, or cohorts, to prevent the spread or limit it if one person shows symptoms.

GRAPE GROWING He explained: "As far as we can as a labour provider, we will be ensuring that every one of our workers travelling from Europe will selfisolate for 14 days before they start work. We will be covering their accommodation costs and providing them with food vouchers for the first two weeks. Then we’re splitting that cost with our clients.”

This is also why those estimates in the vineyard are so important, because Joel will use this information further in advance than usual to get the workers prepared to start.

“The hardest challenge this year is deciding exactly when to get my workers here because ordinarily I would get a weeks' notice from my first client, the one who always starts picking first. Then I’d have exactly a week to get my workers from Romania to England, into their accommodation, inducted and trained up and then start work,” he said. “It’s all guns blazing for a week to get 100 to 200 people here, trained, given tools and everything they need, PPE and high vis vests, deploy them into their accommodation and make sure they’re ready, have a practice run and then send them off to the fields. We have a weeks’ notice

to get that all ready.

“This year the client needs to reorganise and work out his picking days weeks in advance. He has to know exactly how ripe his fruit is at all times, then plot it on a graph and calculate as close as possible when he thinks he’s going to be picking to give me his date.

“If he’s not accurate, I can’t be accurate and if I can’t be accurate, I can’t have the pickers ready for him. This year we actually need three weeks' notice, rather than one weeks’ notice, because of the self-isolation period. We’re having to be way more accurate and rely on the most experienced growers in the country.”

It’s a team effort to ensure that all of these carefully planned social distancing practices are implemented, with vineyards limiting the potential transfer points where possible.

"We’ve got social distancing practices in place for pickers,” explained Matt. "There’s quite a lot of management around providing welfare facilities for workers, while maintaining distancing.

“Covid-19 has actually presented us with quite a challenge in terms of just making sure that

people are kept safe, while they’re coming to work for us, and that they feel safe coming to work for us.”

Joel added: “We are responsible for picking nearly 90 vineyards in a very short window.

We have to be careful we don’t spread any coronavirus so we are extra meticulous with social distancing.

“All of our labour teams stay in cohorts or bubbles of workers. This is one carload of people, so around five to seven people, and they have to stay away from any other cohort.

In the fields they would keep each cohort one row apart, for example.”

He added: “We’ve got a few basic rules in place, like they’re not to share tools at all. You get allocated your set of secateurs, which are numbered at the beginning of the day, and you sign them back in at the end of the day.

“Because of Covid-19 we’re asking our clients to supply them all with nitrile gloves, and again these should be blue because we’re dealing with food and you want to be able to spot them before they end up in your press.

“We’re doing temperature checks before work each morning, before they even leave home, so if there are any concerns they don’t go to work.

Then that whole bubble will self-isolate for two weeks or might not go back to work at all.”

People who move around might appear to be the biggest risk, but the picking crate has been identified as a high transfer risk because it’s one of the few items that will be touched by several people from the vineyard to the winery.

“The person laying out the crates the day before, the picker might touch the crate or move it, then the person collecting the crates again will touch it and then from there it goes into the winery and the wine maker or the winery hands will also touch it,” said Joel.

“It’s passing through six or seven hands so it’s probably the biggest risk of coronavirus spread.

This means there’s plenty of hand sterilising between operations.

“Then hopefully, something I’m talking to a lot of winemakers about, they wash their crates. I’m hoping they’ll be able to put some steriliser in the crate washer.

“We have seen reports of the disease getting transferred on vegetable crates and meat crates from factories, even across country to country where they would have been in a chiller unit so it can happen from here to the winery.”

Planning and preparation are crucial for any harvest’s success, but less than a year ago, could we have predicted we’d be mitigating risks of this scale? Joel’s final piece of advice when making your plans is to speak to your contractor as early as possible to make sure you get the time you need because, as we can see, there really is a lot to consider in 2020.

45

MACHINERY

Surging demand Mechanical defoliation proves a cost effective way to improve fruit quality.

As vineyard managers become increasingly aware of the importance and benefits of opening up and controlling the canopy as early as possible, NP Seymour, the UK’s leading specialist machinery dealership, has seen a surging demand for its range of mechanical defoliators and vine trimmers from ERO. Sam Barnes, viticulture sales specialist at NP Seymour explains: “It is already well-known that good ventilation in the fruiting zone reduces the risk of botrytis and other fungal diseases, improves spray targeting and efficacy, and also increases the berries’ exposure to sunlight.”

In a webinar on canopy management recently held by WineGB, the industry’s membership organisation (which NP Seymour is a proud patron of), Dr Patty Skinkis shared research, from Oregon State University, on the impact of leaf removal.

Not only did the extensive study show that removing 100% of the leaves from the cluster zone of Pinot Noir pre-bloom helped growers to better control diseases, it proved that leaf removal led to the development of better colour and aromas. Data clearly showed increased levels of petunidin and malvidin, which influence bluish or darker purple colours, and increased

46

beta-damascenone, the aromatic compound which gives Pinot Noir its characteristic blackberry aroma.

Studies carried out by Dr Skinkis and her team also showed that mechanical defoliation was just as effective as hand leaf thinning, with both methods having the same results on the vine and overall fruit.

For UK growers, it is thought that £350 per acre should be allowed for single-sided hand leaf removal, making mechanical alternatives a considerably more economical option, even when taking the initial investment into consideration.

Germany's leading manufacturer of specialist viticulture machinery, ERO offers two machines, both available from NP Seymour, which operate in different ways.

Using what’s become known as a ‘suck and pluck’ system, the Elite defoliator has a turbine fan that draws the leaves in towards two counter-rotating rollers which pluck them off the vine. The fan then chops the leaves and distributes the debris out of the front of the machine, ensuring that nothing is left or blown back into the canopy.

“Growers will need to make sure that the tractor which they’re planning to use with the

ERO has plenty of oil flow,” said Sam Barnes. “On the double-sided machine, you need around 30 litres per minute per head, and plenty left over for power steering, plus making adjustments to the positioning of the machine.”

By plucking the leaves from the vine without damaging fruit, these defoliators can be used from flowering all the way through to harvesting. The Elite leaf removers can be configured in a single-row, double-row, or rollover option for those who just want to focus on the east-side of the vines.

Using an ‘air blast’ method, the VITIpulse defoliator removes the leaves by blasting pulsating compressed air into the canopy. While effective at removing leaves, this method can only be used at early stages, from flowering until pea-berry formation and then again right before harvest, as the debris being blown about at high speeds can damage berries, which will increase disease risk.

“There is a place for both types of mechanical defoliators, but the issue with air blast leaf removers is that there is such a narrow window of time when they can be used,” said Sam, who uses the Elite defoliator for all his viticultural contract management work under his business SJ Barnes Ltd. “Larger producers in particular may struggle to work around these restrictions, whereas the ‘suck and pluck’ system can be used straight from flowering right through until harvest as it keeps all the trash out of the canopy.”

The VITIpulse and Elite defoliators both sit on a common front-mounted mast system, which can also be used to mount the ERO Elite vine trimmer. Described by many growers as one of the easiest to operate vine trimmers on the market, the ERO also benefits from specially designed cutter blades which are shaped to ensure a surgical cut and reduce wire damage.

Access and information Pall introduces new Oenoflow PRO XL system.

Pall has introduced the new Oenoflow PRO XL system which is specifically designed to meet the needs and requirements of mid-sized and larger wineries.

It’s the first time any Pall food and beverage product has had the Pall app, which allows everyone the necessary access and information from different stages of the process. The Oenoflow PRO XL system simplifies operations by aggregating data from each machine into a customer specific dashboard.

For example, executives or managers can track OPEX for each system, each winery or for the entire winery group as needed. Production supervisors can access data in the dashboard and download reports showing the filtration history of each machine, including rinse verification recorded by the included conductivity meter.

Operators can use the new Oenoflow PRO mobile or desktop app to view live production status, volume remaining to be filtered and alarms.

Maintenance personnel can use the new Oenoflow PRO mobile or desktop app to access manuals, spare parts lists, service records and even request a service visit from Pall technicians.

The Oenoflow PRO XL system also introduces Pall’s new Optimizer algorithm which automatically adjusts system settings in real time based on the wine’s individual physical and chemical characteristics. These optimised settings replace standard settings that are not efficient for every production cycle.

The Oenoflow PRO Optimizer algorithm learns and adjusts settings to help wineries get the best results from each filtration. With this highly enhanced performance, wineries with the new Oenoflow PRO XL system have seen an estimated 10% savings in OPEX when compared to traditional crossflow systems.

With the Oenoflow PRO system’s advanced automation and ease of use, customers can expect fewer operator errors and eliminate the performance variability between operators. Oenoflow PRO with Optimizer even allows new operators to manage the system at full efficiency on their first day by harnessing the global filtration experience of Pall coupled with the ease of use of the new Oenoflow PRO system software.

Clarification is achieved in a single process step without the need for filter aids, centrifugation or significant impact on the organoleptic characteristics of the wine. By increasing yields, reducing waste volumes and maintaining more consistent filtrate quality, the fully automated systems provide a cost saving sustainable alternative to traditional wine clarification methods.

The systems utilise Pall’s proven hollow fiber membranes with unique mechanical strength and excellent chemical resistance which allow high productivity and repeated exposure to aggressive cleaning regimes. The large surface area modules enable manufacture of compact systems with low water and chemical consumption in line with winery conservation programmes.

VINEYARD for viticulturists in Great Britain ™

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MACHINERY

Compact telehandler relaunched Wide range of upgrades for Weidemann biggest seller Weidemann has released the latest version of its compact telehandler with a wide range of upgrades to what is now its biggest selling product.

The T4512 continues to be available from Yanmar with two different engine versions.

However, the basic engine now has an output of 18.4 kW/25 hp and the larger engine has an output of 33.3 kW/45 hp (engine powers were previously 31 or 40 hp).

The new basic engine therefore has a nominally lower output than its predecessor.

However, according to the manufacturer’s information, its performance is improved. You might be wondering how that is possible. The solution lies in Weidemann's exclusive and brand-new development of an electronically regulated traction drive, known as the ecDrive (Electric Control Drive), which enables the machine’s overall performance to be increased, even in lower hp categories.

Another advantage is that the 18.4 kW engine entirely fulfils the exhaust emission stage V, without any need after-treatment of exhaust

gases. This engine version is particularly wellsuited to users who require fewer operating hours from their machine.

The new electronically regulated traction drive enables the telehandler to be used and driven exactly as required. Weidemann has fitted four different drive modes specifically for this purpose. The auto mode ensures the usual 100% performance of the machine. In eco-mode, the engine speed reduces to 2200 revs/min once the desired driving speed has been reached. This enables a reduction of noise as well as a saving on fuel.

In 2010, Weidemann was one of the first manufacturers to launch a small compact telehandler with a side-mounted engine on the market. Commercial Director, Bernd Apfelbeck, commented: “In those days, our competitors were asking us what we were looking to shift with this little toy.

“In subsequent years, the machine filled a genuine market niche, and in the last 10 years it has become one of the bestsellers in our diverse product range. Its unique combination of lifting

heights, compact dimensions and machine performance are what make it impressive. A lifting height of 4.5m means that it can be used in a wide range of stacking and loading tasks.

“It also makes light work of lifting over most high boards. Its significant 1.25-tonne payload means that large bales of any kind and various weights of material pose no problem. The compact dimensions – a width of just 1.56m and a height of less than 2m – are a real highlight of this machine. These dimensions enable the machine to move through areas where clearance is limited and to work in tight spaces. The telehandler can also be transported on a trailer, so that it can be used at various locations to undertake loading work. When taken together, all these features are ultimately what have made the T4512 so successful in many different sectors.

“But now we are looking to the future,” said Apfelbeck, “converting the engine to level V is our number one priority and we have taken the opportunity to rethink the T4512 once again with the aim of optimising it even further.”

49

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VITIFRUIT EQUIPMENT

Getting the best from your machinery The summer period has increased the collective knowledge of how to get the best and sometimes, unfortunately, the worst out of machinery.

The difference is often due to the skill level of the tractor driver. Some equipment is fairly advanced and the driver needs to build experience with it and if college or prior work has not allowed this to happen it takes time to get up to speed. When delivering a piece of kit, we find that it's often necessary to spend half a day or more training drivers in order to get a good result.

This summer's vine trimming and de-leafing activities have highlighted how easy it is to do a bad job and conversely a very good job; a huge amount depends on the driver and how well he or she understands what they are trying to achieve particularly when it comes to de-leafing. It's very easy to rush the job resulting in damaged berries and torn branches but it has also been fantastic to see how well a job can be done. The various Stockmayer de-leafers have done a superb job this year.

September and October will see more tractor activity with ground cultivations and seeding. If you plan to do some work but don't have the kit then go to the Vitifruit Equipment website to see tools on hire and sale with a range of subsoilers, power harrows, rotavators, seed drills and rollers.

For a post-harvest clean-up of weeds under the vines there are some fancy bits of kit on the market, the most comprehensive from Boisselet in Burgundy.

Over the last 25 years or so we have found it helpful to follow advice from Boisselet, and after harvest use the rotating Petalmatic hoe set into the ground just below weed root level to clear the weeds before winter. Then in the spring repeat the exercise to remove any newly emerging weeds.

Once the soil has been cultivated this way it is then normal to swap heads and fit the simple Cutmatic blade for fast shallow weed control through the summer. The Boisselet design enables many different tool heads to be fitted to the same frame thus avoiding extra expense buying separate frames. Tools include many cultivators, strimmers, mowers and a bud rubber.

When a Boisselet is first used it is necessary to allow time to set it up and try different tools as very often it's necessary to try out different approaches according to the various soil types encountered, weed infestations and the age of the vines. Fortunately, the age of the vines doesn't matter as the super sensing system of the Boisselet is fully adjustable for use in anything from newly planted vines to old vines to commercial orchards. The trick with no chemical weed control is to have something adaptable to suit the various working conditions through the year and remember that the methodical tortoise gets to the finishing line long before the crazy hare.

ď&#x201A;Ź www.vitifruitequipment.co.uk ď&#x201A;&#x2022; 01732 866567 paper-plane vitifruitequipment@sky.com

www.farol.co.uk Rycote Lane Farm, Milton Common, Thame, Oxfordshire, OX9 2NZ Unit 12, Newton Business Park, Newton, Nottinghamshire, NG13 8HA Coldridge Copse, Shefford Woodlands, Hungerford, Berkshire, RG17 7BP Wharf Farm, Coventry, Hinckley, Leicestershire, LE10 0NB Holmbush House, Holmbush Ind. Est., Midhurst, West Sussex, GU29 9XY London Road, Twyford, Reading, Berkshire, RG10 9EQ

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State of the art winery Opening September 2020 Full contract winemaking services

Offering full pressing and processing, sparkling and still wine, temperature controlled storage (including on lees), bottling, riddling and disgorging, labelling and packaging. Laboratory offering wine analysis services.

Contact us & find out more itascawines.com | info@itascawines.com | 01252 279830 Itasca Wines, Penn Croft Winery, Clifton Farm Croft Lane, Crondall, Hampshire, GU10 5QD