Gather the grapes

Hello again,

It’s early September now, and after the dreadful year we have had here in Britain, two of the three varieties I have in my greenhouse (Seyval Blanc – a splendid mid-season green wine grape, and the Merlot – a very early dark wine grape) have both been harvested and the grapes stored in the freezer to kill off any bugs and bacteria.

There were around twenty pounds from each plant (you need around fourteen/sixteen pounds to make a gallon of wine, and a gallon makes around six bottles).

Soon they will be added to the pot along with the Black Hamburg (a very good producer and later dark eater, each bunch is around the three pounds mark (some bigger, some smaller) and there are sixteen bunches there, just to give you some idea, which needs another week of watering and two or three weeks to ripen fully) to produce around five gallons of the most scrumptious wine on this earth.

I tend not to keep the varieties separate when making my wines, as I prefer a deep red, rounded, full-bodied and very tasty wine, and this way I can brew a five gallon batch in one go.

For my own benefit I do not use any chemicals, other than sulphur dust when it is needed, but so far even that has been used only once around eight years ago.

The two earlier varieties should really be outside, as I later found out after planting them in my greenhouse in my ignorance regarding vines around fifteen years ago, so what I shall be doing is to take cuttings from them and show you how to produce vines out in the open, supports and all, from start to finish, and this will be started with taking the cuttings in late November/early December.

The same process can be used to grow vines within a greenhouse just as easily, but what you need to do is to keep your eyes on the varieties that suit greenhouses more readily. All this will be covered at a more appropriate time.

If you do the same as me, this will be a long, drawn-out process, needing a couple of years before you can actually see a bunch of grapes produced from your vine(s), and even then there may only be four or five bunches in the first year of production – it takes time!

See you next week,

George