GuytheGrape

What do you think?

A while ago in an idle moment, ie before we planted a vineyard and idle moments became a thing of the past, it occured to me that the taste of apple juice is no less interesting than grape juice, in fact often it has more subtlety and character. From our semi in suburbia I thought about how great it would be if somebody got the chance with the right apples to make bottle fermented cider using sparkling wine techniques. The coincidence that exactly the right mix of apples remain in our old orchard is gobsmacking. It is what made me think that living here was just meant to be. Bramleys for acidity, Golden Nobles, Morgans and Arthur Turners for sweetness and just enough old local Aller cider varietals that nobody seems to be able to identify for body. We picked our first crop in 2008 using a wheelie bin to get them to the car - who would have thought that an old Mercedes estate could carry a third of a ton of apples. There are long winded debates withi...

We caught up with our friends Bernie and June that we rediscovered on facebook the other weekend who we hadn't seen for more than 20 years , well if you must move to Africa then it's hardly surprising that you lose touch. It was a red wine evening and they brought some Wolf Blass Shiraz and Cab Shiraz. I opened a bottle of Domaine Chevalier 1996 which if you bought it today would cost around 5 times as much money as the two Wolf wines put together. On an evening of shared memories of 1980's London clubs, squats and music, the Aussie wines were just great - quite sweet, rich, lots of fun. The expensive Bordeaux, a bit underwhelming and somehow out of place. I have drunk the Chevalier a few times and really enjoy it - it has everything that I like about great claret because it's light dry wine without too much alcohol and has a smell that goes beyond fruit into nice cedary overtones. There's just no way that you would necessarily want to glug it that's all. It ...

On Saturday we tasted our wine. It's not difficult to describe the emotions that we were going through,  we were quite quiet in the car as we drove off the motorway. To be honest there was more trepidation than excitement. Up until this point you really can't be absolutely certain what your land is going to produce. You know that in theory it is a great site and also that the grapes were ripe and balanced but every vineyard brings it's own distinctive charateristcs that come through in the wine. In Burgundy a Grand cru vineyard can be 200 yards away from a simple Villages plot that sells for a quarter of the price. Over the years (centuries) owners have been able to track in detail which site does best. This was the time to see for the first time what, if anything, would stand out. We were tasting with Martin Fowke who has a better perspective than us as he has a hand in wines from 30-30 vineyards each year. Making sparkling wine, most producers a...

If you saw Countryfile on the BBC two weeks ago they had a feature on English wine and filmed a vineyard owner delivering his grapes to Three Choirs Winery in Gloucestershire. Four weeks ago - that was me. Tasting the Juice, taking a hydrometer mesurement and generally trying to take it in despite more tired  than running the marathon.Three years work sitting in  9 plastic bins outside a winery in Gloucestershire on a cold wet Sunday morning. At least Martin the winemaker had the good grace to comment on how good the fruit  looked before carting them off on the forklift. This is one of the Chardonnay bins being loaded into the crusher which also takes off the stems. Two days of nagging people to handle the grapes so that they don't get damaged undone in about 2 minutes and the result is -----   SPLURGE 1  Ahem - yes, the gentle moving of the precious juice using nothing but the force of gravity that delicately transports th...

 8.00am October 2nd Aller Hill.  Times are very strange at Higher Plot Farm. For example, this Sunday we got up late, read the papers, went for a great walk in the countryside and then cooked a late Sunday lunch before consuming as much period drama and Antique roadshow as is possible for two people. It seems like an eternity ago that we were spending every waking moment and even a few sleeping moments, worrying about ripeness and disease in the vines, transport of grapes, would we have enough pickers and enough Lassagne to feed them with. In the end - everybody that worked that day was brilliant if for no other reason but putting up with two overtired stressed out vineyard owners. Photos were taken by our friend Bernie Brough.  Beautifully Ripe Pinot Meunier.   Morning Frosts.   Obligatory Photo of ball obsessed Fred.  The result of all this labour  - 2500 or so litres of excellent quality white wine that is now taking a rest after firs...

Some interesting stuff about the business prospects for english Sparkling wine from vineyards 40 times our size. Still - it's a level playing field for quality! http://video.ft.com/v/632860887001/Bubbly-prospects-for-English-wine

The wonderful Indian summer means that the apples have galloped ahead and are falling - harvest number one starts tomorrow. The trees are biannual and 08 seems like a long time ago. Then it was lots of nerves and stress, using a wheely bin to transport the apples, a third of a ton in the back of the car per trip, creaking suspension (the car that is). This year we have the tractor to shift the apples down the hill and a Land Rover and trailer to cart them off for crushing at the Orchard Pig cellars. Can't wait to pick up the juice later next week - it will already be frothing away - wild yeasts = very wild fermentation. I think I'll bottle some quickly in Champagne bottles for a bit of fruity early low alcohol sparkle, it'll be interesting to see how far it goes. Coincidently the man from Customs and Excise called round today - the first 7000 litres of cider are duty free, this was as farms used to pay their workers with it - god bless her majesty! After the cid...

Had a great weekend with old friends from college, including a night lying on the ground in the vineyard in the pitch black looking out for the Plaeides ( meteors). We didn't see a huge number of shooting stars but there was lots of hooting with laughter and.... some brilliant wine. CVNE Rioja Reserva 1995 - these wines seem almost indestructable. I got this when it was released and it seemed quite light, not a huge amount of tannin and you wouldn't think that 15 years later it would still be sweet, quite delicate but still with plenty of life.  It sort of breaks a few preconceptions that you think that only wines that start out tough and massive have the potential to improve. We also had our very last bottle of   Beaucastel Chateauneuf 1996 which was not seen as being a particularly good year but I think that the drier less ripe years actually age better. The 1995 is sumptious and rich but for me, a bit soft. I think this just mar...

This was us on ITV in spring 2009, new vines and lots of mud. 2010 no mud and a working vineyard.

Apples have been grown and Cider made at Higher Plot for hundreds of years and there are still around 30 trees still standing which are at least 100 years old. The orchard is known as Half Moon. The one next door is called Full Moon because of the round shape of the hill. Over the next year we are going to start work on restoring it and planting new trees including some perry pears. The apples are old varietals including Golden Noble, Arthur Turner, Morgan Sweet and Bramleys.   The Ton of apples that we crushed for the 2008 Bottle Fermented Cider. This is a real contrast to the vineyard where control over clonal selection, soil management, spraying  and strict pruning is supposed to produce a regular (in terms of quality and quantity) crop. With the orchard, the trees are so entwined with their environment that they crop massively with no disease on a biannual basis with no intervention. This is a pure example of how  overtime biodynamic supporters see a n...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/29a2c3f0-532d-11df-813e-00144feab49a.html Jancis Robinson is a wine writer that is fair and honest on most subjects and her thoughts on the quality of English wine seem about right to me - there is great potential, some people are making world class wines but not everybody is there yet. The link above was her view after a tasting which caused lots of feather ruffling in the English wine making community particularly because she wasn't very positive about still wines - she tells it as she sees it! She questions whether the quality is sufficent for the price and style. My view is that there is a niche for them just in the way that conumers happily pay £7-11.00 for Albarino, Gruner Veltlinger or even Picpoul which is now pretty fashionable in London restaurants despite being very very neutral. For me the varietal Bachus could hold the same place for England and Wales, interesting flavours which would be difficult to repicate in another countr...

Yes - a third vintage of the century in ten years for Bordeaux wines.The others are 2000 and 2005. The press goes into overdrive, people buy the wine as futures - untasted, not even bottled. Prices go up with the top wines now at around €13000 a case. Being old enough to remember years like1988,89 and 90 I wonder how they would have been treated nowadays - God Smiles on Bordeaux with trio of vintages of centennial splendour. You'd think that by now people would have owrked out that on average, Bordeaux has three great vintages per decade although this appears to be rising slightly with global warming. Of all the places where wine is made they have really worked out how to attract interest and sales without having to have the tedious wait for the wine to be ready and the having your cash tied up for a couple of years. I'd love to do the same myself but not having made a single bottle it might be a but cheeky. At the same price there is so much great wine in the world that yo...

In England we are striving to acheive as much alcohol as possible from the grapes in our marginal climate and so it's ironic that I have just spent almost three years marketing lighter style wines which are dealcoholised down  as low as 5.5%. In places like California, South America and South Africa wines naturally come out at 15,16 or even 17% alcohol and in regular wines some of this is removed to make it palatable and this was just taking it to the next step. When you ask people if they want less alcohol in wine they say no until you offer them something which tastes just like their usual brand and then, they start to think about how it would be good to have a glass at lunchtime and not fall asleep at their desk or maybe during a weekday evening when there's work looming in the morning. And so, I think the time has come that I confess to myself and to my friends. Not all the time and I've got it under control but, - yes I am a non alcoholic. I do somet...

Last night I was drinking a great bottle of Masia Barril 1988 Priorato with some friends who had come to stay. I must have bought it some time in the early 1990's from the Moreno shop in Paddington. Still completely fresh with lots of Garnacha character.  One of them lived there at the time and said that it was great until Robert Parker discovered the wines and then it all went downhill. I think that the reality is that a group of well funded producers made a concerted and orchestrated attempt to be "discovered" and recognised as makers of the most expensive wines in Spain. The likes of Clos Mogador and Alvarro Palacios are excellent in a modern style meets exceptional vine stock kind of way but ,you can't help but think that being the most expensive was the motivation and the marketing tool. I've met Palacios and liked him (and his wines) a great deal and he always had a clear sight of what his message was going to be. He was completely un abashe...

Camel Valley have just won the trophy for best sparkling wine at the International Wine Challenge which is big news. I wonder if there'll now be a scramble on to find out where they got their grapes from? Their model is a sound one and is the same as most Champagne houses - grow some grapes yourself but then secure your supplies by buying in under longterm contracts. I wonder if a single grape from the valley made it into the wine? I've never met the Lindos but can't help thinking that the wine business could do with as many people like them as possible - lots of promoting themselves and their brand which would be completely pointless without excellent wines to back them up. I hope that they are sitting in the sunshine enjoying their success but no doubt in reality they will be spraying, canopy managing and generally keeping a winery going.

I sometimes wonder whether non interventionist organic agriculture is a ruse from the big oil companies to encourage consumption. You can use one spray of one litre of glyphosate weed killer and go off and find something better to do or, you can invest in kilometres of plastic mulch, buy a gas weed burner and mow ten times a year using gallons of diesel pumping loads of Co2 into the atmosphere. It's the same with plant sprays - you can go through your vineyard burning up gas every day with compost teas and biodynamic treatments but one single spray of a chemical like CBZ will do the job. How organic can we be when oil gets too expensive or runs out? The amount of work that you can acheive in spraying, mowing, trimming and general transport of heavy stuff with one small tractor is amazing and you really appreciate the back breaking toil that agricultural workers had to go through. Trust me, I've shovelled enough shit to know what it must have been like! I...

This picture is of what was once Pilton Manor Vineyard. It is now planted with an orchard so maybe it has reverted to its true self. The wine they made was truly excellent and there has been a lot of talk in the UK wine business about why so many of the vineyards planted in the 70's and 80's are no longer around. What with all the new plantings I suppose people are questioning whether they will last.The first thing to say is all credit to those pioneers who were really experimenting in a brave new world with varietals and trellising methods. The reality was that for many of them the vineyard was a retirement hobby and the produce only had to reach a basic quality level. They were also told that only obscure German varietals would work and that anything else was a waste of time. Funnily enough, I was also told this by a self proclaimed English Wine expert in the early 1990's. Once they became too old quality often wasn't sufficiently good to make it worthwhi...

2009 is looking good so far with the vines catching up after a slow start from the cold winter. We are hearing that a lot of people were hit by frost which will set them back with a smaller crop. The sap in new buds feezes and it kills them. Secondary buds will grow but they are never as good. This has affected good as well as bad sites and it reminds you that some years you may just have to accept that the climate is against you and you aren't going to get a crop despite all your work. Luckily here we never went below 2 degrees but mentally some years you have to be prepared to lose everything.The next step for us is getting our antiquated sprayer running. You have to complete training courses to use it which sounds a bit nanny state until the practicalities set in of getting the right dose for 3200 vines and not killing your self overturning a third of a ton of liquid in a tank on the back of a tractor.

For many people, the reasons for planting in a particular spot are - it comes with a nice house, - close to good schools - a decent pub just down the road. Other reason - it's in a tourist area and you'll make as much money selling souvenirs in the shop as you do from the vineyard. But, if you are looking to make world beating ultra fine wine then site selection is imperative, if you are only looking for something that is going to give a consistent crop then you have more choice. Despite climate change, our charming climate is still marginal for grape growing . For those deniers I would look at the way peoples harvests have crept forward from as late as November to as early as 1st October in the last 20 years.  If you are going for the highest possible quality I would say you have to have all of the following - Top tips for site selection - South Facing Well Drained Low Altitude Right Soil If you don't have all four t...

Yup - that's one of the most frequent motivations you hear along with "livin the dream". Fine, a great ambition but, are you really sure that's enough -  can you answer these questions - - Do you like being outside year round in all weathers? - Are you happy repeating the a task 2000 times? - Can you stand repeating the same task 2000 times because you got it wrong the first time? - Are you prepared to work all year for nothing if frost hits your crop? - How are your back/shoulders/wrists and joints in general? For me - - By being outside all year round you see things that you would never otherwise see, changing seasons, animals and birds that come to treat you as part of the landscape. - Doing a simple task that requires a little thought each time can lull you into a zen like state and you find your mind wandering in the same way that it can when you do along walk. - A frost or hail storm is part of the risk of plant...

More and more people are thinking about planting vines in the UK and there are plenty of people who will take your money and give you advice on planting the right types of vine and how they should be sprayed but, I'm not sure that it's easy to find out about what it's actually like doing it day to day, how do you start, how much or little work is needed and what sort of results can you expect and most importantly, will you enjoy it? We planted a hectare of Chardonnay Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier in 2007 and are expecting our first harvest this year although we have been thinking about how to do it on and off since the early 1990's.