Harvest Update- it’s a vintage!
2025 has been a bit of a dream year for English grape growers, firstly we benefitted from a warm, dry spring followed by a hot and sunny summer. The dry conditions reduced fungal disease pressure, such as mildew, which is one of the biggest challenges in damp, cooler years.
The mostly dry and sunny September meant that the grapes were able to convert acid into sugar, ripening the grapes fully and getting the potential alcohol levels up to a high enough point.
During the summer we focused on ‘canopy management’ in the vineyard, which refers to techniques used to control the growth, shape and density of the vine’s leafy areas, this includes the shoots, leaves and fruit zones. This is a vital element of grape growing because it directly affects grape quality, through its ability to help control disease, yield and ripening. You quite literally continuously organise the way the vine grows and attaches itself to the trellis, the vines grow so quickly during the summer months, with some of them wanting to tower above the top wire, so it’s a constant challenge to keep them under control. Whilst it’s reassuring to see them so full of life, it’s important to keep a balance, too much green growth detracts energy from the grapes and creates humidity, which increases disease risk, as well as shading the actual fruit, preventing it from ripening properly. Some of the vines are weaker than others, which could be due to soil or drought stress from the year that they were planted. In the case of the weaker vines, we removed more canes, leaving a smaller amount of fruit to ripen. As you pass through the rows you can almost visualise them having individual personalities, the big bossy ones overlapping onto their neighbour’s space- that need reigning in and the ones that need picking up and reattaching to the wire because they’ve clumsily fallen off somehow. We haven’t started talking to them yet, but I can imagine that happening in the future. The overall aim is to get them all in the right position and balance out the vegetative and fruit growth, so they have enough leaves to capture sunlight, to convert into energy to ripen fruit and support themselves, but not too much so that they are too busy putting energy into the actual leaf growing.
We also had to make sure that the sheep and alpacas didn’t escape into the vineyard and that the birds or badgers didn’t get in and eat all of the fruit. We decided not to get bird nets this year because a.) they are expensive and b.) they are meant to be fiddly to put up. We ended up attaching some fun, iridescent and inexpensive streamers along the rows, which looked pretty and made a loud flapping noise in the wind. Next year we plan to speak to a local falconer to see if this can warn off the smaller grape eating birds. We do have a lot of buzzards that roam the skies around us, but we also get flocks of starlings that might decide to land and stuff their little beaks.
The day of the harvest went so well, we had perfect weather, sunny with a slight breeze. We were joined by friends, family and dogs. Thank you so much to everyone who helped. We got all the grapes picked on time, thank you to Round Wood of Mayfield for transporting them up to the winery in Canterbury.
Next update coming soon!