#2: Where the Magic Happens | KENT VINEYARDS 🥾
Curious about what happens in the vineyard? It's all happening within a 30 mile radius of London!
Hello Again!
Bit later than I was hoping on issue 2, and hoping a Saturday afternoon is an appropriate (ish) time for this to land in your inbox and quench your thirst before the Sunday scaries. This time, I’m telling you about a misty Saturday morning out of my usual lie in to pick some grapes, and I thought I’d share the experience here. Also, what I’ve been drinking this week.
Vines for Miles!
Harvest season for the most part has draw to a close in most vineyards in the Northern Hemisphere as we move into autumn.
The experience should have been a regenerative, healing process after a quiet Friday evening but alas, it was not. The night before was a pleasant dinner party that escalated, and so between KO resting my head and hearing the irritating chime of my alarm at 7 am, a gallop to miss a train before reboarding and inhaling a McDonald’s breakfast while licking my wounds.
Trains to Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Essex where most of the UK’s wine is produced, and London’s commuter belt is surreal. Fifteen to twenty miles out on the train from the epicentre of skyscrapers and chaos, I was in the depths of the Derwent Valley, as cows, crops and sheep passed me by.
I volunteered to help with the harvest at The Mount, just outside of Shoreham/Sevenoaks, less than an hour by train from Blackfriars. It’s a small vineyard by any count on the industry, but with over 13,000 vines of 10 different grape varieties across 10 acres of land, a shoebox it ain’t. With an amazing open restaurant, wine tastings and live music over the summer, it’s the perfect weekend day away from London that’s very much needed to maintain sanity.
Vineyards are a year-round operation, much like any agricultural endeavour. Dreaming of a parallel life of whispering to vine leaves in the Tuscan Hills with a glass of sangiovese in your paw at all times? Welcome to the rent-free part of my brain before I snipped the fruits of this season.
The Mount harvest their grapes by hand, where about 70 locals and fans apply to give the vineyard a hand with picking in exchange for a few glasses of the last vintage over lunch. Some bigger vineyards (generally the more commercial ones) will have tractor attachments to whizz through the vines, but we’re at a small operation for scale here. Hand picking grapes is debatable whether it makes a better wine or not, but in some parts of the world that grow grapes on steep slopes, hand picking is the only option.
Vineyards can be specific in their instructions, and I was afraid I’d miss a trade secret which may cock up a batch. Do I have to cut the grapes in a certain way? Leave the ones that were not quite ripe to my eye? What if they look a bit off? Owner of the Mount, Simon, assured me on the walk down that the main objective was to get everything on the vines into boxes to be shipped off to a winery for the next step of processing (guess who was late for the safety briefing). The main objective was to keep all of my fingers intact, and to buddy up with someone who would manage the other side of the vine.
The three hours that we spent snipping four different grape varieties was hard work. Where vines grow is an awkward height for my frame at least, so a half squat is needed with side stepping to get anywhere efficiently and effectively. Quad muscle inferno led to sitting on turned up buckets about half way through, which was quite the relief on the buns. Between the small talk of getting to know the fellow pickers, there were some really beautiful moments of flow where you could really just throw yourself into the process mindlessly. A surprisingly effective hangover cure (with a bottle of water, a Bacon McMuffin and heaps of coffee granted) but I could also see this become cathartic after a very stressful week.
Going into the vineyard from the textbook lessons is a really interesting experience. The scale of the tediousness to keep vines in shape and healthy year after year comes alive as soon as you start to prune, compared to the usual wine tours that I’ve been on before. Maybe it’s a little obvious to some, but picking black grapes is so much easier than white - they really camouflage themselves!
We dumped fruit as we went into boxes that all hold approximately 10 kg of grapes. Per row, it’s tricky to get a full feel for how many grapes were collected for each depending on length. Some that were about 50 m in length seemed to bring up about 8 boxes, while others that seemed to go on forever seemed to get scores of boxes. This might seem like a lot, but considering about a tonne of grapes gives enough juice for about 750 bottles of wine thereabouts… The scale overall can feel a bit overwhelming to get the numbers calculated up. And they all got compiled into bigger boxes before we bid farewell to our hard work!
And now, onto the wine that the Mount Produces. Like most of Kent, their sparkling wines are their flagship - and why sparkling only in England, you might think. The UK’s cool climate and a tinch too far away from the equator means that grape ripening is tricky. So while grapes that will grow in the climate are chosen, these can often be too acidic to make a still wine that doesn’t taste like vinegar. By allowing them to ferment a second time as all sparkling wines need, the acids mellow to become a bougie delicacy. Fun fact, champagne was only champagne as we know it as a method to make the still wine barely palatable.
The Mount also do still wines in red, white and rosé. I had a glass of bacchus to celebrate the end of the morning, which is quite popular in the UK - crisp, and so floral it feels like there’s elderflower cordial already in it. Their reds and rosés are quite light in body from when I tried them previously, and it’s always so lovely to try a wine that’s been grown and crafted on site. The Mount’s wines are mainly found at the vineyard itself, online or in the Sevenoaks area.
If you’re interested in volunteering at a harvest, I’d recommend getting on the mailing list of vineyards near you or reaching out directly to ones that you’d like to get involved with. Bigger vineyards often have machinery or skilled workers to do the job, but you should be able to find a small vineyard that need a few extra pairs of hands to get through the harvest before the grapes start to turn. The wine world is also relatively small, and more of a family than competitive - so people a little more advanced in the field are always open to mentoring from my (early) experience!
What I’ve been drinking this week.
Ever heard of a Cinsault? Cinsault is generally a grape you don’t see made into a full wine - it’s typically used as a blend with others in the South of France or New World red to mellow down a more fiery, full bodied grape like Syrah/Shiraz or Grenache. But on it’s own, it’s a light, crisp red that Pinot Noir or Beaujolais afficionados should feel very happy with in a few sips.
Cinsault is all the rage in the natural wine world that is having something of a moment, and a single blend is definitely wagging a few hipsters tails.
I got a bottle of Thirst from the Radford Dales estates via Juiced Wines as a payday treat, and to get a go on a Cinsault with my wine geek learnings applied. Isn’t the bottle pretty? This one comes from South Africa just outside Stellenbosch, a country where high quality does not need to break the bank. Trying to get something similar from a French or American counterpart of this quality is going to be a lot more expensive.
This wine was relatively fresh from a 2020 vintage, but the fruits seemed had already mellowed beautifully at the stage. Although there was a spritz of ripe raspberry and cherry coming through, the wine had a smoky herby hue to it which gave it a lovely smooth balance - perfect to make sure you don’t neck it like a lemonade. Looking into it a little more, they make it in the same style as a Beaujolais - so light fruits and alcohol, but a little spritz of tannins at the end makes sense.
What to pair this with? Wine pairings can be overtly descriptive: you should by all means, do you. Howeverr, I whipped up pork carnitas tacos at home in the slow cooker when we opened this, and this match was smooth. A light bodied red that isn’t too heavy on the alcohol content will be a good one to lighten up any spicy dishes as a rule of thumb, particularly handy as I haven’t quite got the knack of the correct pinch amount for the atomic chilli flakes that +1 and I grabbed in CostCo moons ago. Perhaps the heat is increasing with age and we should check the best before date…
If you enjoyed reading this or want me to cover anything else in the future, please pop me a reply! Feedback is always welcome.