July 2021

A busy month with various tours and tastings in the barn with a makeshift tasting room. We have been treated to some delightful guests who all showed plenty of interest in learning about the method traditional of making sparking wine…. and more importantly, trying our wine for the first time.

This is flowering with first caps off. Better late than never. We now enter two weeks of very hot weather with the thermostat in the vineyard reading high 30s in full sunshine.  Overnight the temperature does not drop below 12 degrees. Aggressive leaf strip after flowering — the earliest we have ever done it— so that the sun can get directly to the bunches with no wet leaves in proximity.

Over the weekend of 10/11 July we attend a 2-day wine festival at Brightwell Vineyard, Wallingford, hosted by Thames and Chilterns Vineyards Association We were mobbed with nearly 2,000 imbibers.