Chat with Vinny
The UK doesn’t know where to put all its grapes this year. 2023 is a huge grape harvest and there aren’t enough tanks to put it all in. At Laithwaites – that is our production for Wyfold, Harrow & Hope and Windsor Great Park Vineyard – we are just about OK … we have the space, but we are seeing so many messages from people desperately trying to sell grapes. The last big vintage was 2018 and then everyone danced in the street. But this year … they’re anxious.
It’s a nice crop, the quality is there, but only for those who’ve really watched over their vines like hawks. Because the summer’s been warm and wet which has encouraged exceptional levels of rot and mildew. You have to be out there every day watching for telltale signs and pouncing immediately on any outbreaks. Professeur Peynaud, told us in Bordeaux that “a vineyard is a disaster waiting to happen”! Bit dramatic, but when you think, it’s not very natural having fields of identical plants crammed closely together for 50 years or more. No crop rotation. Diseases love it.
Henry began harvesting the Windsor Great Park Vineyard - always the first - last Monday. It was well ripe, but there seemed to be a plague of little wasps which made things interesting for the contingent who came down from the castle to help! Meanwhile … at Wyfold, Barbara suddenly got nervous, spotting not only wasps but little fruit flies on her Pinot Noir. It’s this unseasonal warm late summer weather. So, she brought her red grape harvest forward to Sunday. No day of rest for us pickers this year.
So, Sunday she and I get to the vineyard before dawn to prepare for pickers starting at 8.00am. Put out secateurs, gloves and the buckets I have so meticulously washed. Then start to pick, leading the volunteers from the front. It’s tiring. Maybe it’s my age but by 10am, I’m wilting. By 12, I’m - actually - on my knees. Maybe it’s that Covid jab? Anyway, a kind girl got worried and went off to tell Barbara. Mercifully I was allowed to stop picking and go off in my car, following the tractor-trailer of grapes over to Henry’s winery, to see and taste the first juice out of the press. It’s good stuff and, as I said, there’s plenty of it. Just wait five years before it’s on sale. Anyway, all the black grapes were harvested. Ten tons of them … they were pressing them till three in the morning!
Today they (not me!) are harvesting Henry’s Harrow & Hope, hoping to finish on Sunday … another Sunday! Then Barbara’s Chardonnay will be the last to pick next Wednesday. I’m on the pressing team … easier than picking. Bursts of activity loading the press, and cleaning everything, then three hours break – for me - while it does its pressing thing.
Henry keeps the good old French harvest lunch tradition at his winery … memorable meals … big casseroles, Moroccan chicken, Boeuf Bourguignon, slow-cooked lamb, chicken garden stew, sausages and lentils, pork and chorizo stew, roast pork, thick minestrone ... We eat outside at the long trestle table by the press house if we possibly can. Maybe not in torrential rain, but we cope with drizzle and showers. We are mad but happy.
Harvest lunches are when I think life doesn’t get much better than this. You feel you’ve done some hard work, the grapes are safely in, and someone’s opened a nice bottle or two – old friends Philbo and Natski have come from Oz to help this year, with good bottles. Over the pervading electrifying smell of fresh grape juice, I now smell lunch, at last I can sit down, and there's laughter, and old mates, young kids, dogs … a true moment of bliss.
