Our Precious Grapes Are In

Harvest season in the vineyard is a culmination of an entire year’s hard work and anticipation. It’s a moment of profound importance, as it marks the fruition of hard work and the promise of fine wines to come… and we’ve just successfully completed it!

Hello friends, and welcome once again, we hope that you are very well. We’re here with another diary entry for you on life and times at our Eridge vineyard, so make yourself comfortable, it’s fika time.

The last week for us here in Eridge has been all about the eagerly awaited annual grape harvest – and questions: What moment to pick this speical fruit? How big would the yield be? And of course how good will the resulting sparkling wines be? And under skies sometimes clear and brilliant blue, sometimes less so, and with the help of our excellent pickers led by Daniel from Vineworks, we brought in our fruit.

What can we tell you about the crop? Well at this stage we know that like last year, this was an impressively large volume of fruit – the vines have been working hard this year. And our testing shows that the sugars and acids are exactly where we want them to be at this time. It’s difficult to choose between our varieties, as they are a little like our children, but Chardonnay looks to have had the best year, we are very excited about this fruit in particular.

You may have been watching the busy harvest activity unfold on social media, as we and our community of English vineyards have been sharing some lovely insights. One short video from us we think gives an excellent glimpse of what this time of year is all about.

And staying with social media, we were honoured to have a very positive on-camera review recently from the celebrated wine journalist and commentator Dr Jamie Goode, tasting our Blanc de Blancs 2018. “This is all about pure citrus fruit: ripe lemons and lime with some mandarin detail. Fresh and focused with lovely precision and purity, it’s an impressive effort from young vines.

You might recall that towards the end of Summer we shared news that we had a visit from Munskänkarna’s ‘In Vino’ – a major fine wine magazine in Sweden and Finland. Well that’s now published and they gave us a whole feature of seven pages! Such a great thrill for us, and some really lovely pictures too by Peter Cederling. You can enjoy it here – and read it too if you know Swedish.

In other international news, our Brut 2019 has just set out on its longest journey so far… to New Zealand! Our sparkling wine is to be served at a Christmas event at the British High Commission. And yes we know that the High Commission is in Wellington, rather than Auckland (pictured) but this beautiful skyline picture is so perfectly on-brand that we couldn’t resist it.

Susanna & Douglas
Busi Jacobsohn Wine Estate