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January Wine Update

Wine Journal

 

“If you were to hurry past the vineyard and winery it would be very easy for it to seem as if not much is going on. January offers its steely grey skies, the vines gnarled canes reaching towards them, seemingly frozen. The winery shutters stay rolled firmly closed and the atmosphere inside is serene, the tanks deep in slumber.

Yet when you pause to look, the rhythms of winter reveal themselves. A group of sheep move slowly through each plot of vines, gently keeping the grasses in check, fertilising as they go, every now and then pausing to violently scratch themselves against the trunk of a vine. Which of them is the leader is still unclear…

Starting to work a plot behind the sheep are the pruning team, only giving themselves away with the “tchunk” of secateurs before the rattle of canes being pulled from the trellising wires. Neat rows of cuttings start to form between the vines ready to be mulched back into the soil. The embers of opportunity for a summer barbecue cooked over vine wood flash past. The canes left on the vines this year are longer than last, leaving more buds for the coming years growth. A physical marker of vineyard manager Seb listening to the vineyard over the previous years. We see high vigour in the vines on our site, so the extra buds should help temper the growth later in the summer.

Heading back inside from the vineyards there is a “clink clink” of bottles from behind the doors of the lower winery. 10,000 odd bottles are in the process of being labelled, each thousand finished feeling a little bit like a resolution being achieved. A task like this may seem mundane, but all the while the brain is whirring – thinking back to that tank tasting, might those batches make a blend, if we bottle it now, when could we release the Pinot Noir…?”

Tierney Beames- Head of wine at Tillingham

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