I can still see the 1970s TV advert in my mind’s eye: dew spotted apples being harvested while the
voiceover intoned “Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. The advert was promoting the “exceedingly
good cakes” of Mr Kipling, so my adolescent brain made a connection between the
line of verse and writer, poet and patriot Rudyard Kipling. Did I also think he made cakes in his spare
time?
Of course you all knew that the poem is by Keats, the
opening line of his ode “To Autumn” and makes no mention of apple slices,
fondant fancies or any other favourite of the cake magnate.
This year Autumn may live up to Keats’ breathless
description as we are experiencing what naturalists call a “mast year”, where
trees and other plants produce a bumper crop of fruit and seeds. What exactly causes a mast year is not fully
understood, but I can certainly vouch for the utterly ridiculous amount of
acorns being deposited by the oak trees in our back garden; and I have already
made a batch of bramble jelly and look forward to a good few blackberry and
apple crumbles before the season is out.
Why, even our useless Egremont russet and pathetic pear have produced a
crop this year. Clearly something is
afoot out in nature.
If you spent any time in this country in the summers of 2012
and 2011, you will appreciate that winemakers in England and Wales had a thin
time of it in the past couple of years.
Cool, damp, grey summers do not make for large crops of healthy
grapes. Indeed last year Nyetimber, one
of the foremost makers of English sparkling wine, decided to give up on a bad
job and made no wine at all in 2012.
Growers desperately need a good year:
with the abundance of Mother Nature apparent all around us, will they
get one?
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| Healthy, ripening grapes this week |
Signs are good, so far.
Growers are reporting a potentially large harvest of healthy, ripe
grapes. Nick Wenman of Albury Organic
Vineyard was able to show me Seyval Blanc, Pinots Noir and Meunier and Chardonnay
all looking healthy and plentiful this week.
At the other end of the country, Bob Lindo of Camel Valley in Cornwall,
one of the country’s largest commercial vineyards, reports a large crop of
clean healthy grapes. Sybilla Tindale of
High Clandon Estate confirmed that her vineyard is full of healthy fat bunches
of grapes. All looks set for success.
 |
| Nick Wenman of Albury Organic Vineyard |
Yet, at latitudes this far north, grapes are nowhere near
fully ripe now. We really need more
warmth and sun in order to ripen the grapes and turn a potential harvest into
vats of fermenting must in the winery. Grape
harvests here are likely to be towards the end of October – despite that lovely
summer weather, which allowed the grapes to catch up a week or so after the
setbacks of the long, cold spring and early summer, ripening is still 1-2 weeks
behind schedule. So now, as Sybilla
Tindale says, the challenge will be to ripen those bunches.
 |
| "Bougies" - heaters ready in the vineyard just in case |
Here are some wines to enjoy, while we wait:
Theale Vineyard Blanc
de Blancs 2007 – made by Laithwaite’s, sadly not commercially available
I know, what a wind up – sorry! However, in case you should
come across a bottle of this or another vintage, let nothing come between it
and you. This is a classy glass of fizz
in anyone’s book. Made from 100%
Chardonnay and with plenty of textbook bottle aged character: the nose is pure McVitie’s Digestive biscuit,
with a hint of strawberry shortcake.
This leads onto a many-layered palate of appley fruit, fine and complex. If someone gave me this and told me it was
vintage Champagne, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
And what of Nick Wenman’s Albury Organic Vineyard? The first commercial release of the estate’s
sparkling wine is planned in time for Christmas 2014, so we have a while to
wait to taste the fruits of his labour.
However, there should be (barring disaster in the next couple of weeks)
some of his still wine, Silent Pool Rosé 2013 available from May 2014. The entire vineyard is run organically, but
Nick is also hoping to be able to produce a small proportion of biodynamic
still rosé, an experiment that I would love to taste the results of.
If you are big on sourcing locally then the sparkling wine
from this tiny property with just an
acre of vines on a site facing north (and with fantastic views towards London),
will be just up your street. Owners
Bruce and Sybilla Tindale are originally from South Africa and seemingly
thought nothing of planting a vineyard in their grounds. Their vineyard may be tiny but they’ve done
things properly, studying wine-making at Plumpton College – and getting
award-winning English winemaker Sam Linter (of Bolney Estate in Sussex) to make
their wine.
The wine is a blend of the traditional three varieties used
in Champagne: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and
Pinot Meunier. The 2008, their first
commercial release, spent nearly four years on the lees (ie ageing in the
cellar post-fermentation), which is a key quality element for any traditional
method sparkling wine. The north-east
facing site ensures marked citrus acidity in the wine, along with great length
and persistence of flavour.
Sybilla is not a fan of the moniker “English sparkling wine”
and favours Quintessence as a more evocative term which could be used
instead. Attempts have been made in the
past to get winemakers to unite around names like Britagne (a non-starter if
you ask me), but now that the Duchess of Cornwall herself has derided the term
“English sparkling wine”, perhaps the time is ripe to make a change.
If you would like to suggest a new, more snappy name for
English sparkling wine, please get in touch with me, heather@redwhiteandrose.co.uk. It could be the start of something big.
In the meantime, it’s fingers crossed for fine, warm and dry
weather for the next few weeks, so that in due course we can taste the sweet
rewards of our mast year.
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