Harvest UK Style

Since last Thursday’s visit to the Sussex coast with The Wine Club for Jo’s first ‘proper’ tasting – Eastbourne Town Hall, lovely, enthusiastic customers with Nicola Greening pouring ethereally silky Pinot Noir from Felton Road – it’s been all about the English harvest for me.

On Saturday morning, a group of Laithwaites Wine customers and I joined some eager souls at Denbies vineyard near Dorking at 8.30am. They’d all enjoyed our exclusive white from Denbies, Ashcombe Hill 2008, sourced by English Wine Buyer Cat Lomax, and were now in the vineyard to help pick the 2010 vintage, with the reward of lunch and a tasting after the morning’s work.

Bucket and secateurs in hand and fortified with bacon butties, we set about the rows of Reichensteiner we’d been assigned. Frost had markedly affected this particular part of the 107 hectare vineyard (the largest in the UK by far) especially further up the slope. Still, I’m told our patch yielded 2 tonnes by noon. With a white and a rosé over a three-course lunch and 2 sparklers and a still white in the cellar, I did feel our efforts had been rewarded.

I managed a 9.30am start on Sunday (the 8.30am picking team might have been a bridge too far!) at Barbara & Cherry’s Wyfold Vineyard. With the Pinots (Noir & Meunier) safely despatched to the winery on Saturday, the objective for the day (glorious sunshine!) was to get the other half of the vineyard done, the Chardonnay.

With plenty of volunteers for the picking, I joined what I now think of as the elite team - the weighers. (pic) We soon had a metronomic system in place for weighing every box of grapes as each row came off the tractor, all carefully recorded by Barbara.

The grapes looked in excellent condition, full and ripe with remarkably little rot. Once stacked and swaddled in black plastic film (who knew shrink-wrapping took so much energy and induced so much dizziness?) the pallets of grape boxes gradually filled the vans bound for the winery, to be made into top quality English sparkling wine.

By about 1.30pm, everything was done – time for a beer, a bite to eat and the team photo. 3.6 tonnes we handled – and that excludes the weight of the boxes! I left with a real sense of having done something useful and with a desire for a nice hot bath, hoping to stave off sore muscles the following day.

Having helped with the harvest at Theale Vineyard (quality also very high indeed – hear more on this at BBCBerks) the previous week, I’ve managed to do my bit at three different English vineyards this month – hardly enough to apply for a post at Le Chai au Quai, but 2010 is certainly a vintage I shall be looking forward to seeing in bottle!

Ian
Events Manager

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