Late Spring is an eventful time in the vineyard & winery. Our vines are just starting to form the berries which will become our 2020 wines, and we are busy in the winery too.

It’s going to be another dry year, off the back of the dry 2019, so the only certainty for us at the moment is that our yields in 2020 are going to be down again. But, we are hopeful that quality will be great. Less water = more intensity! But there is a line we don’t want to cross. If it’s too dry, the vines stop functioning, lose their leaves, and can’t ripen the grapes. So let’s hope we can walk on the right side of that line again, like in 2019. We don’t ask for much!!

Howard has just finished doing some slashing in the vineyard to keep the grass down, and the other big vineyard job happening at the moment is moving the trellis wires so that the growing shoots are all growing upwards to facilitate trimming, and to allow bird netting to be attached appropriately as the grapes start to ripen.

This week in the winery we’ve been preparing for our pre-Christmas wine club dispatch, and disgorging some Sparkling reds (that’s removing the yeast sediment from the bottles, which we do in small batches as we need more stock to sell – and with Christmas coming, our Sparkling reds are in high demand!). Next week we’ll be bottling our 2019 Sparkling Chenin blanc, which will then quietly mature in the bottle for about 4 years before release.