Isleworth vineyard update 10

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tonyhibbett

Landlord.
Joined
Oct 24, 2010
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Location
Isleworth, Middlesex
It's 2 years since I first inspected the derelict vineyard with its handful of mouldy grapes and the time has finally come for a decent harvest. I was hoping that the pinot noirs would reach a sugar level of 20%, but it's clear that's not going to happen as grapes are starting to shrivel and rot, but most bunches are sound. I harvested 1 row and from 178 bunches I got 15 kilos. Running this lot through the grape mill took just a few minutes. Fishing out the stems took somewhat longer. This left me with 12.5 litres, including skins and pips, to which I added 3 crushed campden tablets and 2 teaspoons of pectolase. The juice gravity was 1070, so I added 425g of brewing sugar to bring it up to 1090. The pH is 3.3, which is perfectly acceptable at this stage. I will leave it for a day then add the yeast, then 2 more days for the colour extraction before pressing. After settling, racking, fermentation and fining, I would expect about 12 bottles of wine from this batch. There are 4 more rows to harvest, so the total yield would be around 60 bottles.
I thought my first harvest would be a joyous experience but in reality it was tedious hard work and only 20% complete!
 
Living the Dream!

Fingers crossed those bottles will be truly amazing¬!

Still, given the horror stories heard this year (crop devastation through hail storms)from across the channel. Sounds like you could have fared worse.

Best of Luck! :pray:
 
and you didn't lose any grapes to East European travellers that turned up with the fayre either!

nice update - good luck with the rest of the harvest.
 
With all the restoration work, site improvements, tools, materials, travel costs and replacement vines, this vintage will work out at £30 per bottle, so the results had better be excellent!
Eventually it should produce 200 bottles, plus another 100 of pomace wine, per year at very low cost, but no less work. It took the best part of a day to harvest, sort, crush and de-stem 15 kilos of grapes, which have yet to be pressed, racked, fermented,stabilised, fined, racked again, aged in oak, bottled, corked, labelled and bottle-aged before drinking. The prospect of eventually processing 200 kilos seems somewhat daunting. Be careful what you wish for!
Meanwhile, the initial brew is still only a pale red with a suggestion of natural fermentation starting. I just read a blog by a guy with a big vineyard who thinks that treading grapes and letting them ferment on their own natural yeast is a new thing in the UK. I have been doing this for years and the rest of the world has been doing it for millennia!
 
I now have 12 litres of rather pale red juice, not the deep red I was hoping for, despite soaking the skins. This may be as good as it gets from English grown grapes. Originally wine from the Champagne region was made exclusively from pinot noir, was still and pale red. Despite adding elderberries to deepen the colour, it was no match for Burgundy wines, so they had to come up with something else.
I have used the pressings to start a gallon of pomace wine. In this way I could potentially increase the total yield to 100 bottles, reducing the cost per bottle to a mere £17!
 
Well that's ok for white wine, but I wanted to go straight to extracting colour from the skins, with the aid of pectic enzyme and without digging out the press for what I now consider a small quantity of grapes. I got the press because I could not face the prospect of hand wringing multiple batches of crushed grapes. I actually needed physiotherapy due to the strain that caused.
In consequence, I have adopted a new approach, given the increased size of the total harvest, based on my experience of running a small business. The principal is simple: Only take on as much as you can properly handle and only as much as you need to keep ticking over without falling into debt.
I find myself somewhere between the amateur and the commercial wine producer. The big boys use de-stemming machines and express the juice with high pressure airbags and centrifuges.
Rest assured, those stems will go through the press for the production of pomace wine and possibly for the production of something which cannot be discussed on this forum.
 
I was hoping it would start fermenting on its own yeast but this didn't happen, probably due to the fungicide used earlier in the season.
Now that the fine particles of light coloured solids are settling out, the clear juice is a deeper red. Surprisingly, the pomace 'juice' has the same depth of colour.
I will get the press out today as there is still quite a lot of flesh in the grapes.
For the next batch I'll leave the stalks in, remove them after pressing, add the skins, pips and sugar to the juice with pectolase and some of the fermenting juice for a quick start, so that the alcohol can get more colour out.
 
Spot on, unfortunately. According to a recent study, this makes me 10% more likely to suffer from mental health problems and heart disease due to the stress that the noise causes. I am hoping to go a bit deaf to compensate. Bring on the earwax!
I did attend and speak at the terminal 5 public enquiry and even got applauded by the audience for my impassioned appeal against the project. All of those who spoke out against it were intelligent, rational and very well informed, while the few who spoke in favour were nervous employees of BAA sent there with a script. I later discovered that considerable work had already been done underground and out of sight in preparation for a foregone conclusion.
However, West London also turned out to be the hottest spot this year and I am now up to my neck in good quality grapes and apples and beginning to realise that I probably don't have the resources to process them all. The situation reminds me of the sorcerer's apprentice!
 
Meanwhile I unearthed the press. It sits there on its coffee table like a medieval instrument of torture. Inch by inch. it squeezes the living daylights out of the grapes until all that remains is the dry, crushed remnants of the once living fruit, and a bucketful of its blood red essence below, already fizzing and bubbling, giving off the foul planet destroying gas while generating a health crippling toxin devised by the jihadist group known as Al Cohol. They are expressly forbidden to partake of it themselves as there is no need. The whole point of the plan is to make the rest of the world become like themselves: mindless deluded violent idiots whose actions serve no other purpose than to spread fear and chaos for its own sake, die in the process and be rewarded, apparently, with 30 virgins, which due to a misinterpretation of their holy book, is actually raisins, in heaven, which, ironically, might be better used to make wine. Bit of a waste, if you ask me, but it helps keep the population in check, I suppose.
 
I agree with you 100%, unfortunately this is not the forum to air these views!
Let's get back to talking wine.
My home made press is far too big to sit on a coffee table, it will now be used for my Crab Apples.
 
I checked a typical pinot noir grape with the refractometer, which read 19% sugar, so my target of 20% seems possible after all, but at a cost. I harvested another 4 pinots noir vines but with a lower yield on account of the bunches near the ground having been stripped clean. There are plenty of grey squirrels around, and presumably rats, which can easily get under the netting. Also the closer to the ground, the higher the percentage of shrivelled and rotting grapes in the bunches, as well as losses from rodents.
It appears that these vines have an average yield of 3 kg each, irrespective of size, so I will prune them down to their original size and plant new ones in the gaps.
Not so with the isabellas, which are more vigorous and productive. The sugar level is still low at 13% but still slowly rising. They have a delicious flavour quite unlike any other grape and the acidity is now quite low. None of them have shrivelled, split or rotted and the rodents, as yet, show no interest, although, once the pinots have all been harvested, this situation may change!
Which leaves the rieslings, which I will deal with once the last row of pinots has been harvested.
The vexed question about the quality of English red wine remains, but I am working on it.
 
evanvine said:
The vexed question about the quality of English red wine remains, but I am working on it.
I hope you succeed.
As I'm north of the 53rd parallel, I'm going to grow tomatoes!

tomato wine sounds interesting :hmm: :whistle:

think I will add that to my todo list..... right after jalapeño wine :twisted: :-)
 
I know they have been done before

I was not being funny, I was being serious :thumb:

SWMBO loves chilli and loves tomato

these are on my todo list 100%
 
Interesting. 'First Steps...' lists tomatoes as 'not recommended'. Just shows how you can't believe everything you read.
Meanwhile the pinot noir has turned a dark pink and most of the thick sediment has risen to the top to become inch thick light brown scum, so just as well there is plenty of air space. Actually there is a technique of filling the container so that this gunk comes out. Bit messy and possibly risky though.
So I siphoned out the liquid, which gave me the chance to taste it and this the big reward. It's the same difference as between cheap UHT orange juice from concentrate and freshly squeezed orange juice.
I put in some oak chips. Within minutes another thick layer had formed, although with a cleaner look.
There were a few grape skins in the gunk. These had lost all their colour so 5 days fermentation is more than enough to extract all colour.
 
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