What a Harvest- and Double Silver Awards

Life on an English vineyard is always very busy, sometimes challenging, often peaceful, but always interesting and we like to think, fun. And we work all year towards one thing – harvest. The questions ‘Has it been a good year?’ and ‘Will the wines be of great quality?’ can only begin to be answered after harvest…

Hello friends, and welcome back to our updates after the huge undertaking of harvest, 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.

We sit here this week with a smile on our faces. Firstly, one of relief, because the biggest job of the year has been completed and the 2022 harvest brought in… and secondly from joy because of the quality and quantity of the fruit. We haven’t been doing this for as long as some people, but this was our best harvest ever, with lovely clean, ripe fruit picked in record quantities!

This means that we can start to tentitively answer those questions posed in the introduction, with a ‘yes’ and a ‘yes’, but of course there is a long way to go before our 2022 wines end up in your glass.

A huge thank you to our amazing and very global picking team led by Madalen, who came from Indonesia, Trinidad & Tobago, Kyrgystan, Romania, Ukraine and the Philippines.

But as well as working hard, we’ve had some moments of fun too this month. Just before we became immersed in weeks of harvest, Douglas took an evening out to revisit his former life.

Skuld Insurance is a world leading marine insurance company where he was CEO for 15 years, and they were celebrating 125 years of their company… by raising many glasses of our Blanc de Noirs 2018; an excellent choice!

One exciting aspect of growing our business these last few years has been developping the network of different lovely establishments where you can enjoy our wines when you are out and about – resturants, wine bars, boutique hotels etc.

And with Italian hesitage in mind (Busi) we’re particularly pleased to reveal that you can now find our wines in three places in beautiful Verona. Thanks to our Italian friends at Marcto Direct, you can find our wines in Antica Bottega del Vino, La Bottega del Baccala’ di Cipriani, and La Pergola Trattoria.