Canopy Management

Flowering and fruit set are done and dusted and with the recent rain, the vines have been growing vigorously. Good news... there is a good amount of fruit on the vines. Not so good news is that it rained heavily on 15th July which is St Swithin's day. According to the rhyme:

“St Swithin's day if thou dost rain For forty days it will remain St Swithin's day if thou be fair For forty days 'twill rain nae mair”.

The weather has been in line with the St Swithin's prophecy as every day so far there has been some rain, albeit very light on some days.

The vineyard team have been very busy tucking In, leaf stripping and shoot topping.  We train our vines to the Vertical Shoot Positioning system (VSP), which means the new shoots are trained to grow vertically upwards between moveable foliage wires and resemble lines of mini hedges. In the early part of the summer, the young vine shoots are automatically postioned vertically when we lift the foliage wires into place on the trellis posts. We then tuck in the stray shoots by hand several times post wire lift during the summer. The foliage wires give the shoots the support they need to grow upwards and once they have reached the top of the trellis and have out grown the height of our foliage wires, we top the shoots before they get so tall that they start to droop downwards and cause shading. Topping the shoots is done mechanically with a vine trimmer. Once the vines have been topped they throw out lateral shoots, which will escape the trellis and link up with the neighbouring vines, blocking the vine alleys. These will therefore need to be trimmed once during August. 

We have also just finished leaf stripping on the East side of the trellis to expose the newly set fruit to the sun and wind. We are removing the leaves in the fruiting zone only which is at the height of the fruiting wire (0.9m) and approximatly 20-30cm above. Most shoots carry 2 -3 bunches and by removing the leaves in this area it will enable the berries to dry out in the morning sun, reduce shading and allow air flow around the all important fruit to to help reduce the risk of mildew and botrytis. We leaf strip by hand, but there are machines that can do this for you, although not as well as manually. 

Next up will be some more tucking in, mowing and strimming..... watch this space. 

In a few weeks time we will bottle all our sparkling wines from the 2022 vintage. We usually bottle in July but the extra time in barrel and tank we think will give the wines a touch more depth and complexity. The wines are currently going through cold stabilisation to ensure tartrate crystals do not form later in the bottle. The crystals are harmless and acceptable in a bottle of still wine (often found in aged red wines) but can cause excess fizzing when a bottle of sparkling is opened!. The wines will then be filtered and ready for bottling. 

Other than the general logistical challenges of getting ready for bottling, pre-bottling preparation involves starting the mother culture of yeast in a tank. This needs to reach a specific population before being added to the individual tanks of wine. The culture takes 4 days to prepare, then on the morning of bottling, the yeast culture is added to the tank at a quantity of 5% of the volume of the tank. Also added and thoroughly mixed in, is a specific amount of sugar for the yeast to consume. The bi-product of yeast metabolising the sugar is CO2 and therefore the fizz we all know and love. If the mother culture is added any earlier there is a chance that the fermentation could start in the tank, negatively impacting the bottling. 

This year we will bottle approximately 40,000 bottles of sparkling wine, which has been the average amount for the last 5 years. This will soon change with the new plantings from 2019 potentially producing a decent yield this year for the first time. With the vines through flowering and the berries/bunches rapidly growing we have our fingers firmly crossed for a hot and sunny August and September.