Category: News

Vineyards and Coronavirus

It’s 7.30 am.

A cold northerly breeze is whipping across the vineyard. The country is in lockdown, imposed the night before by an uncharacteristically subdued PM. 

I am the first to arrive. 

Ahead of me 35,000 vines shiver in the wind, like expectant children, waiting to be pruned.  There is no sign of the Romanian pruning team.

Ten minutes later, my phone rings.

“I’m sorry, Nick, but they’ve gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone.”

The silence is palpable.

“Where the hell to?”

“To Romania. It’s home.”

It takes a while for the implications to sink in.

The vines need pruning. Without pruning, there will be no fruit.

Already our existing wine sales, made largely to the hospitality and events sectors, have plummeted, and with the nation in lockdown they will rapidly fall to zero. No sales, and now, no wine.

Bugger…

Give us botrytis, mildews, drought, floods, wild boars, even Jean Claude Juncker, but please, not this…

Rapid calls to the Home Team.

By 9am Virginia (Head of Events, Left), Georgie (Office Manager, Right) and Tristram (Head of Sales, Centre) have joined Paulo (Vineyard Manager), Andras (Technical Director) and I on the vineyards. We work all day but by 4pm are in despair.  It’s a Dad’s Army moment.

There is no way we can hope to finish on time, and the buds will be bursting in just a week from now.

At 4.30pm Tristram puts out a Facebook request.

By 10pm he has 40 willing pruners from among the young, stranded at home unexpectedly, furloughed by school and university.  Of the 40, ten have their own transport and can start at 8.30am the following day. They are selected.

“Hands up anyone with a degree in biology.”

A single hand goes up from among the new recruits, all standing 2 metres apart, all on time at 8.30am sharp, armed with pack-lunches and with broad smiles on their faces.

“Ok.  You’re hired.  Any engineers?”

Two hands raised.

“Mathematicians?”

Another two.

Perfect.  They can be the pruners, the vanguard, to be inducted within twenty minutes into the arcane science of spur-pruning.

“The rest of you Liberal Arty-Farters can follow me (English Literature) and Tristram (Theology). We will follow behind, pull out the pruned wood and tie down the canes. ”

Like vineyard, like life.

Each worker is given four rows, of equal length. Ten metres apart.  Too far to talk and relative progress visible to all. 

Eight days later and we’ve finished. The team is still smiling broadly. The sun is shining and the wind has turned almost southerly. We are in shirt sleeves. The vines are pruned and tied down, like obedient children, ready to burst into life.

Whoever had the effrontery to call the young ‘Snow-flakes’?

They worked hard and they worked fast, always on time, with never a moan, despite the aching backs and bruised hands (pruning is a hard discipline), and always with smiles.  They showed true grit.

They were a revelation and, in the circumstances, a mercy, too.

THANK YOU OUR INSPIRING YOUNG TEAM!

PLEASE COME AGAIN NEXT YEAR!

Vineyards and Coronavirus

Vineyards are deceptively dangerous things.

Like sirens calling sailors to the rocks, they sing a song of natural beauty whilst the perils – and there are many – remain concealed.

Our own first siren-call, etched clearly in our minds, was in September 1998.

We were staying as a guest of Christian’s at Quinta do Noval vineyard, in the Douro Valley, for the ‘Vindima’, or harvest.

With young children and hectic work and family schedules we were, at that point in our lives, as much inclined to seek to own a vineyard as to volunteer to space-walk without oxygen, yet we were unknowingly about to experience our first call to the rocks.

It would happen each evening, at the end of a sweltering day, after the last of the wicker baskets, groaning with fruit, had been heaved up through the ancient stone terraces.

We would sit under the Cedar of Lebanon in front of the Quinta, as the shadows lengthened, and sip chilled white port and tonic whilst the distant song of the ‘vindimadores’, treading the grapes in the ‘lagares’ further down the hill, would float back in the cool night air, like a siren-call.

There was something almost impossibly romantic about the sound and the place.

It was another ten years before we finally succumbed to the call altogether and decided to plant an English Sparkling Wine vineyard ourselves around our home in Hampshire, in partnership with Christian.  And it is now, over 20 years later, that we are embarked on our own, twelfth harvest.

Over the years we have experienced many of the dangers lurking beneath the viticultural romance: the late spring-frosts that in late April and early May can ravage the infant vine-buds just as they are bursting into life; the rain and the cold that can destroy the essential flowering in June; the mildews and botrytis that insinuate themselves like silent assassins as the grapes develop; the marauding song-birds, with their perfect palate for ripe fruit; to say nothing of the wasps and the fruit flies and a whole assortment of other devastating insect-life on the vineyard.

We have experienced, too, the misery of an entirely failed harvest.

2012 was the English wine industry’s ‘annus horribilis’ (it was also the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee: you might remember that chilly, rain-sodden summer as the Thames flotilla lurched through horizontal rain and a soaked Duke of Edinburgh never once batted an eyelid?) One of the more astute English sparkling winemakers proudly announced, Yquem-like, (although no doubt through gritted teeth), that they would make no wine that year. Nor did we, as it happens.  The fruit just wasn’t good enough, but we were too grief-stricken to turn it into a PR coup.

“How”, I remember asking Christian at the time – no doubt sounding like some old testament Israelite – “could this happen?  Just how much more can be thrown at us?”

“Lots” he replied, a master of sanguine.

He has been doing this for far longer, and is rather more grown up about it.

“We have never had giant hailstones in England, that can destroy a harvest, and sometimes an entire vineyard, as frequently happens on the Continent.  Nor do we suffer from excess heat, that can shrivel the fruit to raisins. Nor,” he added, warming to his theme, “do we suffer from grape-eating racoons, as they do in Germany, or wild boar in Italy, baboons in South Africa, or glassy winged sharpshooter flies in California.”

Of course he is right.

The vineyard is always greener on the other side and, as the sirens will attest, they are treacherous things wherever you are.  

But then, as we now all know, came Coronavirus…

(To be continued)