We started the year shivering and coated in mud as chilly winds and heavy rains blew over us. The season got off to a miserable start: cold, wet and disheartening with vine growth lagging by a month as we reached May. But, mercifully, May was magical: warm and dry with stable high pressure and that’s […]
This year was a year of weather frustrations and failure. We started with a March drought, having to water the young vines in our High Field (Lakestreet). The vines were growing like Topsy until April 1st when they stopped in their tracks with the arrival of three months of chilly, damp “bank holiday weather”, broken only […]
2011 was the year of great Chardonnay for us, both in terms of quality and quantity. The red grapes were soaked by rain at flowering, so we lost half the potential fruit load through lack of pollination. The Chardonnay, however, flowered earlier in the warm dry days of early May, thanks mainly to a very […]
This was a roller coaster year where growing conditions were at times brilliant and at others extremely challenging and where a degree of strategic decision making and risk taking made the difference between a great crop and a very mediocre one. We started on the back-foot with late bud-burst due to the chilled, snow laden […]
This was the year the vines pretty much just grew themselves. After a snowy winter, the growing season started with a long dry spring, 8 weeks without rain. A normal July followed with weekend rains and sunny weeks. Next came a dry and sunny August, rain in early September as the fruit began to swell, […]