Harvest Reports

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 by the one warm week in May (for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee). August was average, while the autumn was cool and grey. We needed another two weeks of growing time as we headed towards November which is not a month associated with good plant growth....

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 summery April amid an 8 week period of cloudless skies and beaming sunshine.We picked the Chardonnay later than most of our neighbouring vineyards, as the load was significant requiring longer to reach perfect ripeness. We risked the possible drop in acid levels by letting the...

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 winter. Then came a prolonged sunny and eventually warm period over the early summer, with 12 weeks without rain, which brought the vines from 3 weeks behind 2009’s growing pace to “on a par“ by early August. Then came the coldest, wettest August for a hundred...

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, warmth into October. We recorded temperatures of 18°C on October 1st and that set the scene for a gentle Indian summer that carried us through to an early harvest.