Author: Ben

Only 25kg from my own vines this year, compared to about 55kg last year, but with the new vine training over the pergola I’m not too surprised.

However, with the generous donation of a further 30kg from a local allotment owner I am back to similar quantities as last year.

I had the young trainees helping with the crushing and pressing which they seemed to enjoy greatly, until a ‘massive spider’ was spotted during crushing.

In the end, 35 litres of juice went into the fermenting barrel, which I will cool for about 24 hours to allow it to settle.

I’ll then syphon off the clear juice, measure SG and TA, making any necessary adjustments and get the fermentation going.

All in all a very successful day.

My plan was to have some bottles of 2018 bubbly ready for Christmas.  Two months ago I took 15 bottles from the cellar to start the process of riddling – getting the dead yeast cells left over from secondary fermentation into the top of the bottle.  I thought I would do it an easy way and just put the bottles directly upside down into a rack, and gave them a twist every other day to help move the yeast downwards.

Although most of the yeast did settle in the cap, no matter what I did, there was always a thin deposit of yeast around the neck that just didn’t want to shift.

I have looked up how the riddling process is done traditionally and have found that they usually use additives to help the yeast settle and to stop it sticking to the glass. They also have a very specific method of twisting the bottles over a period of 3 weeks to get the yeast to move towards the cap.  Who would have thought that a tried and tested method developed over hundreds of years would be better than my ‘easy method’!

It’s too late for me to add any clearing agents now, but I can at least try the traditional method of riddling.  So, I have modified the rack to look like this:

And I will follow the procedure as shown here:

I have marked all the bottles with a white line so I can see what orientation they are in to help me follow the steps above.  If all goes well I still might have something ready to drink by Christmas…

Time for an update on the 2019 harvest.  The wine fermented well over about 2 weeks at which point I racked it into a PET bottle, full to the brim to exclude air contact as much as possible.  It has been sitting for about 2 months now and is clearing well.  We had a few cold nights recently which helped to cold condition the wine.

You can see tartrate crystals which have formed in the wine.  These will get left behind at the bottling stage.  It’s important to cold condition before bottling otherwise these crystals can grow in the bottle once they get put in the fridge.  They don’t affect the wine in any way but it can be a little off putting when you get one of these in your mouth.  They are known in the trade as wine diamonds.

After 6 months of settling I will bottle the wine.

So it looks like those French Champagne producers really did know what they were doing after all! The latest riddling process worked and so this morning I decided to disgorge 6 bottles to enjoy over Christmas. All looking very impressive with their caps and labels. Happy Christmas!

I’m so pleased that I managed to get some bottles of bubbly ready in time for Christmas. I proudly opened a bottle on Christmas Day, and took a couple of bottles to our family party over the Christmas holidays to see what they thought of my creation. My brother also arrived with a bottle of Nyetimber and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and announced that we would be holding a blind tasting!

After making sure all three bottles were at the same temperature, three glasses were poured out and labelled 1, 2 and 3. 1 being the Nyetimber, 2 being mine and 3 the Veuve Clicquot.

After some confusion over how we were meant to be judging the wine we decided to get tasters to simply state, a) which is your favourite and b) which do you think is Ben’s wine. Obviously my brother and I didn’t partake in the voting as we knew which was which, but this didn’t stop us from taking regular samples of all three wines!

This was all done for fun and wasn’t taken hugely seriously and I certainly wasn’t expecting to come out on top, but I couldn’t help but secretly hope that it wasn’t completely obvious to everyone which was mine, with tasters having to awkwardly pretend that it was hard to find a favourite. I was quietly buzzing with excitement as I watched everyone tasting the three wines in turn, genuinely trying hard to decide on which they preferred, and having to go back for re-tastes as they weren’t quite sure.

The Veuve, not unsurprisingly proved to be the favourite, but mine actually got two votes, beating the Nyetimber! Most people guessed correctly which one was mine, but still three voters got it wrong. So of course I’m completely over the moon with this. I really feel like after eight years of blood, sweat and tears, I have produced something I can be proud of.

Pretty much the only thing that made my wine stand out as the homemade wine from the other two, was the appearance. The two commercial wines were crystal clear, whereas mine had a very slight haze. Not much, but detectable if you are looking for it. I don’t add any finings or carry out any filtering, which Nyetimber and Veuve almost certainly do, so it’s fairly inevitable. I wonder if I could market this as a feature, like so many modern craft ales which are ‘intentionally cloudy to preserve flavour and freshness’. Recently there seems to be a huge rise in popularity towards natural products, so with my pesticide-free, unfined, unfiltered, organic wine it’s bound to be a winner!