Fast & Furious

It is that time of the year again......when the vines are going through their early summer growth spurt. During the first two weeks of June, they have been growing fast and furiously, catching up with their late start due to the cold and wet early spring. With the new shoots reaching upwards, like Icarus, in their efforts to get closer to the sun, the April bare trellis is now almost a wall of green. The inflorescences (flower clusters), have expanded and separated and are looking good and strong just before the onset of flowering, which had already started in the Chardonnay vines at Stonehouse on the 15th June. I am hoping the recent very heavy rain has not damaged these delicate flowers, time will tell. It has been good to get some water into the ground after a very dry May and early June, although there has been plenty of rain about this year..... our rain guage at Woodchester recorded a total of 640mm of rain for the whole of 2022 compared with 459mm so far this year, most of which was in March and April. 

Spurred on by the recognition of their hard work in the vineyard by a Gold Medal for our Rosé Brut 2020 and 4 Silver Medals in the WineGB Awards, the vineyard team have been working just as fast and furiously. Despite the heat, they have been shoot thinning, wire lifting and mowing. The hot and humid weather has meant early starts and early finishes. 

The next few weeks will be critical for a successful flowering and fruitset.... we need lots of sunshine and warmth to make the most of the potential on the vines this year. By the next vineyard update, I would hope that flowering will have finished. 

I was very pleased to record a less than 5% loss of our new vines planted last year, quite remarkable given the dry summer. We always soak our bare root plants in friendly mycorrhizal fungi before planting which is said to help young plants establish a root system more quickly and withstand stress.... perhaps this helped. The lost plants have now been replaced.

With English Wine Week in full swing and lots of events at vineyard, it is a lovely busy time of year. I hope you too have been enjoying the sunshine. 

Since April the primary focus in the winery has been very much sparkling wine based which will continue in both the key areas of disgorging and the build up to the bottling of last year’s vintage.

This month one of the focuses has been tasting trials for the 4 sparkling wines in our range. It’s the blending of the sparkling base wine tanks and barrels, it is very interesting but can be a touch complicated.

The fine balance in decision making as to how much of one wine to make compared to another. This involves a few factors. Most importantly is the quality of each wine, but also yields have to be taken into account. For example, last year we made a decent amount of still Pinot Noir, but this has meant that 2 clones we left to ripen for a red wine are no longer available for the Reserve Cuvée or the Rosé Brut, which historically have both been Pinot Noir dominant wines. We want to keep consistency in the style of each wine therefore need to decide the volume of each we produce. The tanks get allocated based on flavour, aroma and structure, but they vary quite a bit from the most fruit forward to those that have more complexity. One key factor is to maintain the ratio of varieties in the blend and most importantly the quality of style we produce.

So, all these factors need to be taken into account resulting in quite a lot of head scratching and deliberation but decisions are made and tanks are blended. Next step is pre bottling stabilisation.