News from Bluebell Vineyard

What a week for news! First the mighty Nyetimber – one of England’s best known and most prestigious sparkling winemakers – has announced it will abandon its 2012 harvest citing the poor quality of fruit, due to weather damage, as the paramount reason for the decision - see www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2012/10/nyetimber-abandons-2012-harvest/ .

Then at the other end of the scale, newcomer Red Squirrel Wine of Richmond-upon-Thames was also forced, again by the atrocious weather, to scrap its inaugural harvest, which was scheduled for picking this week – www.redsquirrelwine.com .

Complete abandonment of the vintage is in a sense the ‘nuclear option’. Mercifully it is a very rare event but, as I’ve remarked more than once, the summer of 2012 – now officially the wettest for 100 years – has been little short of a disaster for so many in the business of growing food.

You would think this would be enough to send aspiring winegrowers back to the drawing board, but not a bit of it. At any rate not if the actions of controversial Lord Ashcroft – he of the off-shore Belize tax haven and former deputy chairman of the Tories – is concerned. For the noble lord has just announced he is to acquire 150 acres of vineyard in West Sussex with the intention of producing 400,000 bottles of fizz a year – www.uk.news.yahoo/uk-lawmaker-splashes-english-sparkling-wine-165924569--sector.htm.

Apparently Ashcroft also intends to build his own winery by 2014; pretty easy I guess when, if the Evening Standard story is correct, you have £4million to spend!

Meanwhile back at Bluebell we continue to hold back on our harvest – the wet, blustery and often cold weather is simply a nightmare. Of course when we do get the grapes picked we are expecting our volumes to be down – like everyone else – but we are still hopeful about the quality.

It has meant another week of hard preparations especially in the winery; I couldn’t resist the attached picture of winemaker Kevin Sutherland, looking as though he might have other ‘more pressing’ things to do than supervise the filtering of the ‘dosage’ for the 2010 Seyval Blanc.

And observe also, all those clinically clean picking-boxes – forlorn in their enforced redundancy and just itching to be put to proper use in the vineyard itself. In fact the only picking we managed this week was to help out our friends at Painshill Park - a beautifully restored 18th century landscaped garden and vineyard - whose harvest has also suffered at the hands of the weather –www.painshill.co.uk.

Finally, let me say what a pleasure it was to meet Kevin Dodd & David Tingey of Hercules Wine Warehouse in Sandwich this week ( www.herculeswines.co.uk) - a couple of seasoned wine trade professionals that’s for sure – great to be working with them.
Bluebell Vineyard
Sliders Lane
Furners Green
Uckfield
East Sussex
TN22 3RU
www.bluebellvineyard.co.uk