2022: A Year In Review

 

I have to admit to being excited about the potential of the wines from the 2022 harvest. We were fortunate that for a second year we had a good yield but if you were to review the 2022 growing season, it was not without its challenges and right up to the beginning of harvest, it was difficult to accurately estimate the harvest yields.

The 2022 Season:

2022 started off with the pruning season in January and great hope for a new and covid free year. The Covid years had seen significant increases in costs of production across the board but we were fortunate to have had a good harvest in 2021 in terms of yields and quality of fruit. Coming after the 2020 harvest, which had been very small at 59 tonnes we were relieved to pick 127 tonnes in 2021. Whatever the yield, the vineyard still needs the same amount of tending each year, so wines from a small harvest are more expensive to produce.

Winter/Spring:

At the beginning of the year we undertake the mammoth task of pruning our 80,000 vines. It takes three months to complete and involves three separate tasks – selecting the fruiting cane for next year (highly skilled), pulling out 90% of last year’s growth from the trellis (a good workout) and tying down the fruiting cane to the fruiting wire (a delicate task as the canes can be brittle and break, losing the potential yield from that vine for this season). We aim to finish pruning by the end of March and look forward to budburst and the start of the new season.

March also saw the bottling of our still wines and a new addition to the range. A single varietal Ortega with only 1,200 bottles made. The 100% Ortega was 100% fermented in barrel and released in the summer. It has proved very popular with our customers and as a result of a very good Ortega harvest this year, I can confirm that we will be making a single varietal Ortega wine again. The barrels have now finished their ferments and we will be tasting the developing wine over the next few weeks.

Spring Frosts are always a threat and although not as bad as in 2021, Bougies (anti frost candles) were lit in our frost pockets on 4 separate occasions between 1st to 30th April 2022 with temperatures dipping as low as -4 on Sunday 3rd April. I am pleased to say that very little damage was sustained as a result of the action taken.

May saw the planting of 3,000 Seyval Blanc vines at Woodchester for our popular Cotswold Classic sparkling wine. We were fortunate to get some much needed rain to help them establish as later in the summer the dry conditions were a tough environment for newly planted vines and we did lose more plants than usual due to the heatwave.

Wedding Bells - May was also the month that my daughter Meg was married to ‘Grapevine Greg’ - our vocal vineyard apprentice. It was a glorious day at the vineyard which was transformed for the weekend into a lovely venue for a great couple. The Reserve Cuvée was the Sparkling Wine choice for the occasion and Culver Hill their white wine.

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Summer

Summer 2022 was a scorcher. As a cool climate for viticulture we are usually praying for sunshine and warmth but it was the reverse this year. We were praying for rain…..in fact we were doing a rain dance. The Met Office records it as the hottest summer (tied with 2018) on record since 1884 and the driest since 1995. July saw temperatures up to 37 degrees celsius at our vineyards. The vineyard team wilted and the vines shut down to conserve their energy. Contrary to expectation, temperatures upwards of 32 degrees are stressful for vines.

And grapes do get sunburnt. This is usually an issue in hot climates but unusually for England, we saw a small degree of scorching on most varieties where the grapes shrivelled into hard raisins. As a result of the hot and dry weather, throughout the summer and the lead up to veraison, the berries were small indicating light bunch weights (reminiscent of 2020) but the early September rain helped them to swell and the Indian summer gave the flavours time to develop into some of the best fruit we have picked.

Early summer is the competition season, and in June we were thrilled to be awarded 3 silver medals by Decanter for our Sauvignon Blanc 2021, Orpheus Bacchus and Reserve Cuvee. Later in the summer, we won 4 silver medals at the WineGB awards for the Reserve Cuvee, Sauvignon Blanc, Orpheus Bacchus and Cotswold Classic. The Reserve Cuvee achieved a hattrick of silvers with another silver medal in the Champagne and Sparkling Wine World Championships. Congratulations to Jeremy, the winery and vineyard teams. It can be a hard life winning awards! Each medal needs to be celebrated with a glass of the award winning wine. 

June was also the month of English Wine Week. Special events and tasting were hosted by our Tasting Room Team and Cellar Door Shop, including the official launch of our 2021 Sauvignon Blanc and the rare opportunity to taste our full range of wines at our EWW Grand Tastings.  

Tirage bottling of the sparkling wine took place in June during English wine week with 40,000 bottles now safely in stillages.

In July we were the proud sponsors of our local music festival, Chalfest, aka The Party on the Hill. With a great line up and wonderful crowd and organisers, we set up a wine garden created by Graduate Gardners, in view of the stage and it was a great weekend, enjoyed by all. 

 Autumn and Harvest 2022

In September we were delighted to be announced as one of the four finalists for the Award of Drinks Producer of the Year in the Cotswold Life Food and Drinks Awards. Attending the awards ceremony at the Cheltenham Races on the 17th October it was stiff competition and the award was deservedly won by Hales Farm, congratulations!

We were extremely lucky with the weather during harvest. A very dry summer led to some much needed rain in early September followed by a near perfect Indian summer in September and a warm and relatively dry first half of October. Occasional rain but nothing too drastic to interfere with picking. It was not the earliest start to harvest, but it is the earliest finish at Woodchester Valley.

It was also the shortest and most compact harvest since our winery was established in 2016. Harvest usually takes from 6-8 weeks. In 2022 it took just under four weeks to gather in the grapes and we were picking solidly from the start to the end of harvest with very few breaks.

Pinot Noir was a variety which performed particularly well this year and due to the earlier harvest and exceptional ripeness levels we left some Pinot Noir clones for a later pick for a red wine for the first time since 2018.

All in all, we have an excellent balance of yield and quality from 2022. Will it be a vintage year? It certainly has the potential.