Now it gets serious

I left you a few months ago having just taken in a rather wet and decidedly limited harvest of Pinot Meunier and Melon B. The whole affair was amateurish and rather good fun. I had promised a few local friends a share of the output if they came to help me pick and process the crop. They all turned up. We got soaked, as did the grapes. We brought them home in boxes in the back of our cars, riddled with wasps and ladybirds, and spent several hours destemming and turning them into juice in a traditional basket press.

Sure enough the juice fermented, and we ended up with what I think is known in the trade as a "small batch" of 30 litres each of very pale Meunier rosé, and lemon-tinted white Melon de Bourgogne. A very small batch indeed.

I have bottled and tasted the rosé while the white remains in its plastic tank, I suppose you could say sur lie, in the vague hope it may get round to attempting malolactic fermentation in the warmer temperatures.

Reader, my Meunier will not be troubling the judges at any forthcoming wine awards. The net result of early frost, downy mildew-ravaged foliage, a hasty harvest in the rain after birds took all the juiciest grapes, home winemaking with no recourse to technology and a still wine made from grapes intended for sparkling is a product with alcohol below 10%, zero residual sugar and a pH more suited to a school chemistry lab than a wine cellar. In the words of a oenologist lucky enough to give it a try, "the nose is nice but after that it's basically lemon juice". More charitably I'd say the flavour profile is that of a young zero dosage English sparkling that has gone flat.

All good fun, but not a template for 2025. Because this year is the real thing: our first commercial scale harvest. Most plants are now mature enough to have been single guyot pruned and tied down. We've only just passed the period of frost risk and Friday morning saw a scary -0.7C on the weather station, but assuming the vines have made it through relatively unscathed and assuming flowering and fruit set are OK, and mildew doesn't strike again, or botrytis, and we get bird netting in place before the pheasants start to chow down, then we should be getting a few tonnes of grapes, sufficient for a few thousand bottles.

This is season 6 of owning the land at Little Bursted farm. In 2020 I bought the plot, 2021 prepared the soil and planted cover crops, 2022 planted, 2023 waited, 2024 had a bit of a (wet) dry run. So far it's been rather low stakes. The worst that could happen was expensive damage to the trellising or the death of some vines. The annual outlay was a few grand. This year the costs and the risks escalate.

I am going to spray a lot more than previous seasons. I've always erred on the light touch side with spraying, mowing and canopy management. Is that down to a love of nature and sustainability, or congenital laziness? Let's agree it's a happy marriage of the two. But that has meant downy mildew outbreaks in both of the last 2 seasons. Humid weather, long grass and long spray intervals turn a vineyard into a bit of a petri dish. I'm not going to go mad, but I'm keeping the grass down lower in early summer and getting the chemicals on every couple of weeks. There will be plenty of spores hanging around in the soil after last year, waiting for their moment.

(As an aside, I had Kevin's sheep on the vineyard in the early spring. It seemed to be going well until a mystery animal attacked, killed and ate one of the flock. Horrible for the farmer to have to deal with that, and rather unnerving for the vineyard owner. They don't warn you about things like that in those vineyard grazing webinars.)

I'll need to do much more canopy management this year too. The vines are mature and will romp away. Then, if we manage a half decent growing season and the grapes get to veraison, there must be no repeat of last year's field-scale bird banquet. The netting will be going on.

I'm not sure about harvest. That can hopefully still be an amateur day out for neighbours, family and friends. We probably need 15 to 20 pickers. I'll certainly give it a go. We'll need to get hold of a van or trailer to ship the crop to the winery, and that's when the real cashflow hit begins. Making and storing wine is expensive. You are locking up capital for at least a year and usually, with sparkling, rather more than that. 2 or 3 vintages worth of outlays before any income comes in at all.

All of which means that as well as ramping up the viticulture I'll be ramping up the commercial side of the undertaking. There are big decisions to make: the style of wines to be made, including whether we make any still or concentrate solely on sparkling; the branding and look and feel, the labels, the name (Little Bursted has been a working title. Look out for an upcoming post), and what sales people call the channels. As a small vineyard you are generally reliant on a mixture of cellar-door sales, vineyard tours, the on trade (pubs and local restaurants), local shops and large events. A lot of pounding of the cobblestones to come.

But for now, back to the viticulture. The growing season has begun. Stuff just got real.