First Pinot Grapes are Harvested

Yesterday we hand picked around 700kg of Pinot Noir for the 2012 Silent Pool Rosé, which produced around 450 litres of excellent must. It's been a very difficult year so we decided to selectively pick only the very best fruit to ensure that we maintain our quality standards. Next week we will pick the ripest Pinot Meunier which will also be used for the still rosé. The production this year will be small like last year but the quality should be good.

The Seyval and Chardonnay still need to ripen further and we are keeping our fingers crossed for a bit of an Indian summer next week.

Harvest Update

This time last year we had picked all the grapes on the vineyard and Silent Pool Rose 2011 was in the making. This year the weather has been so dreadful that we have had to delay the harvest for 2-3 weeks to take advantage of a few last rays of sunshine, which will hopefully increase the sugars and reduce acid levels. Whilst good sparkling wine requires fairly acidic juice, still wine needs to be made from must with lower acid levels and a higher sugar content.

To help the ripening process we have been stripping leaves away from the grapes and taking off unripe bunches to give the remaining fruit the best chance of ripening. Some of the Pinot bunches are now quite ripe but equally some are not. We have therefore decided that we will probably pick the ripe bunches at the end of next week and leave the others for a further week when we will also pick the Seyval and the Chardonnay. A final decision on picking dates will be made this Wednesday when we will assess the acid and sugar levels with our expert winemakers.

Whilst quantities will be lower than we would have hoped for this year, there is still a good chance that we can produce some really good quality wine.

Vinyard Update

The Vineyard in the heart of the Surrey Hills

It's been a very difficult year for viticulture in the UK. The weather was cold and wet in May and June, which led to poor fruit set in July. Since then the wet, but warmer, weather in July and August has resulted in Downey Mildew arriving on the vineyard, particularly in Block C, which is planted with Chardonnay.

Overall I estimate that we will pick around 6 tonnes of grapes this year compared to the 15 tonnes we might have hoped for. The big question now is will we get enough sun to ripen the grapes before harvest which is likely to be towards the end of October?

Good quality sparkling wine can be made from fairly acidic juice, which is why it is why sparkling wine is so successful in England. However still wines, including our Silent Pool Rosé, need riper fruit to produce a wine with good flavour that isn't too acid. The good news is that because we have less fruit we will need less sun to produce good quality juice.

To help with the ripening we have been busy plucking the leaves by hand from around the fruit on all 21,000 vines - next year were going to get a machine to automate the process!

Making Sense of Wine

Dr Wend Parr

I attended a fascinating masterclass recently on wine sensory evaluation given by Dr Wendy Parr from Lincoln University in New Zealand.

When you taste a wine there are three things to consider: the person doing the tasting (physiology and psychology), what is in the wine glass (chemical composition) and the interaction between the two. "The tast of the bottle is not just in the bottle it is in your mind."

It was fascinating to taste wines without seeing them and find out that it wasn't that easy to tell the colour. Also, tasting wine with a nose clip made them much more difficult to "taste" as the nasal passage plays a key role in taste as well as smell.

We learnt how to categorise wines in terms of how sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savoury they are and also how the order in which you taste wines can influence your judgement. It was comforting to learn that wine experts often get things wrong; I felt that one of the most important messages was to trust your own judgement.

We finished with a blind tasting of six wines and later learnt that four were Sauvignon Blanc (two from France and two from New Zealand) and the remaining two were produced from the Bacchus grape in England. Amazing how the same grape varieties from different regions can produce such different flavours. The Bacchus wines were excellent but nobody guessed the origin or the grape variety!

New Website goes live - www.alburyvineyard.com

We are delighted with our new website www.alburyvineyard.com which has just gone live. Developed by Dave Nyss of d2, it provides more information about the vineyard and an improved user interface. It will also allow customers to purchase the wine on-line when we release this years vintage next May.

The new site has information on stockists, including local wine merchants and restaurants who have our wines on their lists. Sadly most have already sold out!

You can also sign-up for email updates which will including blog updates and a quarterly newsletter.

Hope you like it. Comments welcome - good or bad!

Horn Silica (501)

We were up early this morning preparing biodynamic preparation 501 which is a Horn Silica spray. It is most effective if sprayed at sunrise, when the dew is still on the ground, so we met at 5.30am to prepare the mixture and Alex was on the vineyard spraying soon after 6.30am!

Horn Silica is used during the growing season to enhance growth and maturation. It is sprayed on the vine canopy to enhance the photosynthesis of the leaves to improve growth and maturation. It helps to stabilise plant metabolism and increases nutritive value. It can also strengthen the vines against attack by fungus.

It is prepared by making a paste using finely ground quartz crystals and water. This is placed in cow horn and buried during the Spring. Small amounts of the crystals are then dissolved into water and sprayed on the vineyard. The crystals enhance the effectiveness of light on the vines and so it is best sprayed on sunny days.

Downy Mildew

Downy Mildew "oilspots"

Unfortunately we have found evidence of Downy Mildew on the vineyard in Blocks A and C. Initial symptoms are usually seen on the leaves, which show yellow "oilspots" on the leaf surface. It is caused by the fungus Plasmopara viticola and is potentially a devastating disease as it can spread very rapidly through the vineyard causing the foliage to die as well as infecting the grape bunches.

Downy Mildew infected grapes

Downy Mildew only occurs in specific wetness and temperature conditions. There has to be 10mm or more of rainfall with a temperature of 10C over a 24 hour period (often referred to as 10:10:24 conditions) with rain towards the end of the 24 hour period followed by several hours of leaf wetness. It spreads when overnight conditions are 13C or more and several hours of leaf wetness occur after dawn. The fungus also produces white "downy" patches on the underside of the leaves.

The only organic approved fungicides effective against Downy Mildew are based on copper hydroxide and copper sulphate. However we are restricted to using small amounts and they will only help prevent the fungus from spreading and won't eradicate existing infections.

Alex will be spraying the effected areas with copper today and the rest of the vineyard with potassium bicarbonate which may also help.

Not a good weather year for the vineyard!