OATLEY VINEBLOG
OATLEY VINEBLOG
Hooray! Wasps stayed away. Acid held up. Turned out 17th Sep WAS the optimal date. Just the right number of pickers and loaders to make not-too-demanding work. Great team! Phew!
I always panic 7pm the night before and again at 4 am that the usually ambitious (for me) menu wont ever get done, and everyone will go home hungry. But thanks to Paula, Elisabeth, Ned, Jan and our daughter Liz, YESS! We made it again this year and the meal turned out rather well. A bit 50 shades of green (menu below right) - both daughter-in-law Paula and I had had a good kale season - but even the most avid meat eaters seemed to enjoy it anyway.
Iain as usual got up early to make the coffee-time pizza and spectacular bread plaits. And then in the field, the grapes, the grapes! Looked and smelled just wonderful and were the star of the show. We were a bit behind with vine-tending all summer, partly because of our July family wedding and rather more because the very early season concertina’d up the work, but nonetheless the grapes were in great condition with no disease and only a tiny spot of insect damage - mainly from Red Admiral butterflies rather than our usual Madeleine nemesis, wasps.
Lovely that Elisabeth Else, of “Winecellardoor.co.uk” the UK’s premier wine tourism website, could join us. Elisabeth has had an open invitation to come to harvest since she first visited us years ago. And proved a dab hand on Saturday evening at peeling and chopping, as well as picking with a will on Sunday.
72 tubs it was, exactly filling Farmer John’s big 3 ton trailer in two layers. Pleased that the Madeleine yield is coming up again after its major reworking three years back when we took out the old spur-pruned cordons that had covered historic gaps. That initially cut the yield really rather a lot, but slowly, slowly as the gap fillers start producing and the cut back old vines get into shape, it’s coming back up.
The hour-long journey with the grapes on Monday morning to Pylle went smoothly and the crush too. Steve the winemaker had had to cut short his holiday because the harvest was so early, but he was there to welcome us Monday morning, along with son Harry. We took the chance to sample the Madeleine ‘16 we’d left in our Seguin Moreau barrique after its first season to keep it sweet over the summer - very nice, pretty much like the ‘16 Barrel Matured though it hasn’t got the dash of Kernling that its predecessor had. Need to decide whether to keep it for blending or bottle it s a special reserve.
That 2016 Barrel Matured featured in Julia Trustram Eve’s English wine tasting seminar at The Oxford Wine Festival, the previous weekend, where we were exhibiting too. Lovely that with the new unified UK Wine Producers, a marriage of the old UKVA and English Wine Producers, we now get included in opportunities like this. The festival was as usual a nostalgic couple of days for us. Managing it with Jack and Benji added to the challenge but they had a good run both mornings in Oxford’s Florence Park, dog heaven where they all run free and learn to say Hello nicely, and a Saturday afternoon canal path foray to Isis Lock, to compensate for a lot of time in the truck.
Full set of photos here>>.
Ned’s little video of the grape crushing at Steve’s winery here>>.
Photos of Oxford Wine Festival on our Facebook Page here>> (why not “Like” our page to keep up with day-to-day goings on at Oatley?)
Below, by request, is the final graph of the sugars and acids - this year’s line is the left hand one - earliest and sweetest!
Madeleine harvest - JUST brill!
Wednesday, 20 September 2017