In The Vineyard - 2008

The year has been a rollercoaster ride. Mild then cold, wet then dry, all very unsettled with through the summer, only a few spells of sun and real heat. January put the look on the year, all very unsettled and atypically mild, during February things improved with some lovely sunny days and little rain but this unusually dry February was followed by rain in March and April with the temperatures falling; April was colder than either February or March. The concern was frost which can do damage to the young tender shoots, but we were lucky and escaped. After a cold start May was the warmest for many years but it was damp with intermittent rain which went on through June, July and August. At Warden we were lucky as most of our flowering happened during the dry spells and we had a good set of grapes with little coulure or millerandage. Rob was kept busy spraying and trimming back the excess vegetation, growth that was encouraged by the wet. As so often happens mid to late September saved the day with some lovely sunny days and less wet. We had some very welcome help with leaf stripping, thus ensuring that the grapes got maximum benefit from the sun and drying winds. At the Open Weekend, 13th / 14th September, although a good weekend, we were gloomy as all seemed so backward but it came right very fast, grapes changed colour, sugars rose and we picked on October 7th to make a sparkling wine base with the remainder being picked on Friday 10th As always we are very grateful to our enthusiastic band of harvesters who as usual did a great and speedy job.

The outcome looks good we have a reasonable quantity of Regner, Reichensteiner and Müller Thurgau to make into sparkling wine, a reasonable quantity of Bacchus to make as a 100% varietal and enough of the other varieties to make a still wine, 2008 will probably be Abbot – tasting in January will decide. The crop was amazingly clean, thanks to Rob’s hard work in uncertain conditions (we cannot see how we could ever be organic), we had excellent sugars and enough acidity for the sparkling wine.

Sparkling Wines
We made sparkling wine from the 2007 vintage, two different blends and these have been through their second alcoholic fermentation and are resting on their lees (sediment) and will remain resting until early autumn 2009. We hope to have the wine on sale at Christmas 2009. The sparkling wine from the 2008 harvest will, after blending, go through its second alcoholic fermentation in the late spring of 2009 and be ready for sale at Christmas 2010 – a treat in store!!.

Derek Smedley MW
October 2008