September 2024 — Winding Wood Vineyard

We had 100 guests to the vineyard tasting room (our barn) for the launch of Christopher’s book about the creation and nurture of the vineyard here at Winding Wood. We built a impromptu stage out of grape picking crates and adorned with a burgundy oak barrel akin to the ones we use to ferment our wine.

There was a crush to get a glass of fizz but then an orderly queue to buy a signed copy. As Emma Milne-White of The Hungerford Bookshop kindly commented in her introduction; ‘There are two things I love the most: books and wine; and best if they are found in the same place.’

A good month in August was followed by an atrocious one in September: constant rain and little sunshine – much need for ripening the grapes. We thought 2023 was bad but 2024 is looking even worse due to mildew and the sun’s rays. Downy mildew has raged through many a vineyard. It is going to be an expensive black hole with very low yields and some deciding to write off the entire harvest. The organic vineyards have fared better it seems, says John Buchan, a leading agronomist, which he puts down to a mixture of attentive vignerons and the plants being more resistance to disease. Organic vineyards have had no large doses of pesticides sprayed over them. Instead, they have to build up their own barriers.

One very heavy isolated downpour with 15mm of rain in 2 hours (cascading over our water gauge) has damaged and split some of the Chardonnay berries. These will now wrinkle and turn black, hopefully not infecting the remainder of the bunch. If it is not one thing, it is another.

We turn to using clays to spray on the bunches as means of drying out any disease and botrytis from damaged berries. We use bentonite (used in the winery for fining) and kaolin mixed into a roux with a plaster paddle mixer attached to a hand drill. Always water in first and then sprinkle in the powder. It is akin to making a white sauce. This is also a deterrent, by creating a barrier on the surface of the bunches, to the dreaded spotted winged drosophila (SWD), which likes to lay eggs under the surface of the berries. Then they hatch and create huge damage. One can spot their entrance on a berry visible as small slit. When spotted, we take each off individually – painstaking work.

Trying to predict a harvest date is tricky. We are beginning to think the 3rd week of October at the earliest. Leonie and I have the annual bet – the optimist v the realist. I paid her £200 last year!