First day of harvest

After almost two and a half years of nurturing the vines, today we finally picked our first fruit! It’s been a great summer to grow grapes in the UK, with vineyards all over the country starting to pick almost two weeks earlier than usual. Early reports indicate both higher quality and quantity than normal, due to this year’s exceptional summer.

We’ve been monitoring the sugar and acid levels in the grapes for some time now and decided to pick half of our Solaris first. This fruit will be used to make sparkling wine, the other half of the Solaris is intended for still wine and will be picked later. Picking earlier means the grapes will have slightly lower sugar and higher acids, this is crucial for sparkling wine that will undergo a second fermentation in the bottle. As the secondary fermentation will increase the alcohol slightly, we need to be careful not to pick too late when higher sugars could make for undesirably high alcohol levels in a sparkling wine. Higher acids are also important due to the amount of time the wine will spend in the bottle. A more acidic environment helps keep the wine stable and prevent spoilage.

With help from volunteers, friends and family we picked over 650kg of fruit today and sent it off to our winemaker, Halfpenny Green Wine Estate, where they whole-bunch pressed the fruit as soon as it arrived. Early analysis of the juice is very encouraging, with sugar and acid levels ideal for sparkling wine. The juice will now be left in the tank to settle, after which it will be ‘racked off’, taking the clear juice and leaving the solids that will have settled at the bottom of the tank. This juice will then be inoculated with yeast for the first fermentation to start.

Picking the fruit today was just the first step in the long process of making sparkling wine. It will be at least March next year before we will think about bottling the base wine and preparing it for secondary fermentation. If everything goes to plan, we are hoping to release this wine in summer 2020, four years after planting.