The harvest is now finished and some excellent quality must is now happily fermenting in the winery. Time to relax a bit and for some a holiday - Alex, our vineyard manager, has decided that she needs a break from the English winter and has gone to New Zealand leaving Attila moping around the vineyard!
2015 has been another good year for Albury Vineyard. Overall the quality of fruit was almost as good as the exceptional 2014. The grapes were very clean with no sign of disease and sugars were great. Acids were a bit higher than last year for the fruit that we picked for our sparkling wine, but that's not bad news as the best bubbly is made from fairly acidic grape juice.
The only slight disappointment is that yields were quite a bit down on last year. This is mainly because we took about 25% of the fruit off the vines in August which is known as a green harvest. August was very wet and cold and we were worried that the grapes wouldn't ripen enough. By taking off fruit all the plant's energy is focused on ripening a smaller quantity. As it happens, we had a bit of an Indian summer but we can't gamble on the weather. As Alex quite rightly says "quality is more".
We will be releasing Silent Pool Rosé 2015 next May. There will only be 5000 bottles compared to the 6000 this year which has pretty well already sold out. The 2015 wine for Albury Estate sparkling will be bottled next May for secondary fermentation and will probably be released in 2018.
Next month we will start pruning our 21,000 vines and early in the new year we will feed them with compost teas and a mix of biodynamic buffalo manure and compost from Laverstoke with various biodynamic preparations. Hopefully 2016 will be another good year!
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