On a recent Sunday in mid October, accompanied by a small group of friends, I brought in a first tiny, non-commercial harvest from The Field.
Ah, the grape harvest. A thing of romance and tradition.
If you want to see this romance distilled, primped up to the max and laced with a dollop of high camp, I recommend a visit to a museum called Hameau Duboeuf in the Beaujolais village of Romaneche Thorins. It's a gloriously eccentric and really quite ambitious personal shrine to the king of the Beaujolais negociants, Georges Duboeuf. I once spotted him in the museum cafeteria, that unmistakeable skinny aristocratic figure with his wild sweep of hair, tucking into the menu du jour and a glass of his own product.
One of the attractions in this temple of viticultural kitsch is an iMax-style video that immerses you in the sun-kissed Beaujolais harvest. Apple-cheeked vendangeurs in the flush of youthful health and good looks gathering juicy grapes and singing in the soft golden light of September, then retiring tired but contented to a bacchanalian harvest feast (with cameo appearance from guest-chef and George's mate Paul Bocuse) then later heading, one suspects - as viewer you are left with a few knowing gallic hints - to the barns to copulate among the hay bales.
Reader, our harvest was not quite up to Hameau Duboeuf standards.
It was anything but sun-kissed. For the first half hour it mizzled. Thereafter it developed into the sort of persistent, character-building horizontal drenching that forms the cinematic backdrop to geography field trips in Mid-Wales.
On arrival I realised that all the Pinot Noir was gone. The pheasants had gobbled every single bunch in all 20 rows. They were now making their way systematically through the Pinot Meunier and Melon B, working inwards from the margins of the fields. We caught some of them in the act. Shameless bastards.
Still, we managed to gather in a healthy if rather sodden harvest of 8 small crates of Melon B and 2 of Meunier. I suppose you could say we retired tired but contented, but rather more pallid, wasp-stung and damp than those Beaujolais pickers. Back at my house we sorted and crushed throughout the afternoon until we had filled a couple of fermentation tanks with pale yellow and pink juice.
I didn't quite stretch to a bacchanalian feast with celebrity chef cameo but I did offer some Sainsburys pizza. There are no barns or hay bales to retire to in my part of South East London but I have, of course, no way of telling what our middle aged helpers got up to when they returned to their homes later.
Since harvest day the juice has been sitting in a cool cupboard fermenting.
Fermentation is a mercurial phenomenon. The Melon refused to budge for nearly 2 weeks. I kept peering in and pitching more yeast, but nothing happened. Eventually I took some out and made up a starter of a few litres. After a couple more days the giant airlock started to puff away. By that time the pink Pinot Meunier had sprinted through the whole fermentation. It was already bubbling, scummy and giving off vapours like a witches cauldron on the first morning after a night supposedly cold settling out on the patio.
If you've ever attempted home brewing you'll know how exciting but potentially heartbreaking those first weeks in the tank can be. I used to make a few litres each year from grapes grown in our garden. Too often I've spent all summer coaxing grapes up to ripeness only to have the results ruined by volatile acidity, or gone stinky like rotten eggs from over-reduction, or simply having that vaguely unpleasant but hard to pinpoint homemade tang. Not this year. Both white and rose are clean and vinous, if still rather bracingly acidic. I had a little taste when I racked them into bulk storage this week.
What can I deduce from the flavours so far? The Pinot Meunier smells and tastes like Pinot Meunier. If you want to know what that means then have a read of my blog post on the variety from last year. Lively and red-fruit dominated. It'll benefit from a few months to rest before bottling, and a touch of sugar.
More intriguingly, the Melon B smells and tastes like Melon B. Strikingly so. It's so often damned with faint praise as a "neutral" grape yet this really couldn't be any other variety. It's only just finished fermentation, it's still cloudy and not yet spent any time on lees, yet it's already like a basic Muscadet. It has that stony, metallic, citrus, ever so slightly marine flavour. It also has the green apple that comes with not yet having gone through malolactic fermentation.
This is exciting. As I wrote in my last blog post nobody to my knowledge has attempted Melon B in England before. I'm now in a position to confirm it has a future here. If it can produce something like I've described under some pretty unfavourable conditions - a poor, damp summer and a foul autumn, vines affected by downy mildew, picked a little earlier than ideal because of birds, and made at home without professional winery or lab equipment - then it seems to me the sky is the limit for English Melon.
It'll work very well as a base wine for sparkling. But I could equally imagine quaffing the still version with some Whitstable oysters. Truly a wine of the terroir. The Thames estuary terroir.
Now it all has to sit over the winter, absorb some amino acids as the lees break down and slowly clear from the top downwards. I'll probably bottle the Meunier next spring and the Melon in June or July. I find myself peeping behind the door at it several times a day but there's nothing to see other than the odd bubble in the airlock. It's a reflex, like checking in on social media when you know all the news already. Hopefully I'll soon forget all about it and resist the temptation to tinker.
Still, it's there now. Truly a micro batch, a little over 60 litres in total. I think the fancy word in winemaking circles is "limited release". But no matter. It feels like we've passed a milestone. I have made the first wine from grapes on the vineyard.
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