If I were writing this in October 2018 I would be gazing out of my window at bright golden sunshine still bathing the trees in warmth as a gorgeous summer resolutely refused to let go its sweet grip and fade into winter. I would be chatting to happy winemakers whose vats of juice from superripe grapes were overflowing and whose wineries were heady with the scent of wonderful flavours being created. Ah, the joys of climate change. It will be like this every year from now on, won’t it?
But I’m writing this introduction in a very different October. The skies have been heavy and glum for well over a month, so that there’s really no point in holding on to see if a balmy Indian summer will somehow bring back the cheer. There is a little sun peeping through – pale, nervous, barely enough to shift the autumn dew off the grapes as the bands of pickers don gumboots and waterproof jackets and trudge out into the muddy rows to judiciously harvest the healthiest and juiciest bunches of this year’s considerable crop. Ah, the joys of being a marginal wine area, on an island buffeted by weather systems on all sides. No one has ever truthfully said that British weather can be predictable (no, not even the climate pessimists). And if we think that climate change is just about blue skies and record sunshine – well, that is part of the story, but only part.
Even if the 2019 vintage was one of the wettest for some time – we have had a tremendous run of warm, dry Octobers this century to make up any summer shortfall – well, the spring and the summer of 2019 were full of good things. There were no spring frosts to worry about. The vines flowered in good, warm, dry conditions and there were heatwaves that broke records in June and August. I spent quite a bit of the summer travelling through the English and Welsh vineyards and I didn’t have one day when the sun wasn’t shining, not one day when I didn’t think what a glorious country we live in, and what an uplifting addition to our landscape is made by all our vineyards.
But there were also record cold temperatures in June and August, often right next to the heatwaves. And as the hurricane season in the Atlantic built up to being one of the most furious and vicious on record, with Hurricanes Dorian, Humbert and Lorenzo causing destruction on the other side of the Atlantic, the storms’ tails hit the British Isles with unusual force, blocking out the sun and drenching our fields.
But it shows how far we have come as a wine-producing nation that we were ready for the tribulations of the year and, given the heat of much of the summer, large crops of good grapes could still be brought in, healthier, at higher sugar levels and weeks earlier than would have been possible a generation ago. We now have such a confident bunch of grape growers and wine producers in this country that problems are met head on, and quality is merely different, rather than worse, in most years.
Does this show we’ve come of age as a wine producer? I’m sure it does. The UK is still marginal in climate terms – but that’s what you need to be if you’re going to make great sparkling wine and fresh, aromatic still wines. Cool climate, yes, but warm enough to ripen Chardonnay and Pinot Noir for sparklers, and not too warm to bake away the hedgerow scent of the Germanic and hybrid varieties that still produce some of our most delightful still wines. The greatest marginal cool climate wine country in the world? Could we be that? Yes, we could. The men and women growing the grapes and making the wine here are as talented and passionate as those anywhere across the globe. And the raw material they have to deal with, the grape harvest they bring in each year, is intriguing, unique, sometimes unpredictable but bursting with the potential to make wines unlike any others.
And we must play our part. We must choose to drink English and Welsh wines. If we live in wine-making counties, we must support our local producers. And we must visit them. Wine tourism is of ever greater importance to wineries and vineyards. As more and more people seek ‘experiences’, not just the mere flavour of a bottle of wine – well, there’s no better way to get the best out of a bottle than by visiting the place the grapes are grown and meeting the people who do the work. That’s how you get to love and understand wine. Other countries have made themselves experts at this ‘Wine Experience’. Now it’s our turn, and there’s no more beautiful country in the world to do it in than our own.
