After planting 50 Chasselas vines in our front garden in 2000, last year finally saw our mini-vineyard kick into production. The following account of the 2023 vintage starts at the end and finishes at the beginning, before looking ahead to 2024.

Since the 2023 harvest, four demijohns of fledgling Chasselas have been standing on our upstairs landing. Three of these vessels contain five litres each; the fourth container holds three litres. All four are now filled up to the top. Apart from transferring wine into the three-litre demijohn as well as gradually adding surplus wine to every vessel, I have left the juice to do its own thing, more or less, since mid-October.

Each of these four batches remain on their primary lees – or ‘gross lees’ – and will continue to do so for months to come. The gross lees refers to the dead yeast cells (fine lees) as well as any other solids that have settled to the bottom of the vessel. Keeping the wine on the gross lees for such a length of time is a moot point – the juice is normally siphoned off the sediment early on to leave just the fine lees. The gross lees can impart off-notes or lead to bacterial spoilage, theoretically. But – and this is the thing – they also create a desirable reductive environment, the opposite of oxidative. There is a bit of chemistry involved that I don’t pretend to understand, but essentially the gross lees can help to condition the wine and make it more stable and resilient to oxidation later on. Such wines may appear quite closed in their youth but are built for a prolonged life. The lees also adds complexity and results in a rounder mouthfeel, provided you leave it in contact with the wine for long enough after fermentation. That stinky, eggy gas called hydrogen sulphide is a common by-product of reductive vinification. You can aerate the wine during fermentation to resolve the issue. I did this at first but then stopped. The whiff disappeared of its own accord anyway.

My use of the gross lees is born of necessity. I am just an amateurish one-man show, not a slick modern winery. As such, any natural means of keeping my wine fresh is welcome.

This approach has worked so far. My wine has not turned into vinegar yet. This is progress on last year’s more perfunctory effort involving a partially filled plastic bucket containing whole bunches, stems and all. (I won’t ever be going down that particular route again.) The glass of the demijohns is of course completely airtight, while the bungs and airlocks seem to be doing a good job of stopping or at least minimising oxygen ingress.

I aim to age the wine for about a year in order to extract full benefit from the gross lees – and be completely sure that fermentation is finished. The yeasts may or may not spring back into life during the warmer months, so I feel it’s best to give nature a wide berth while it takes its course. All going well, I should have some bottles ready for drinking by Christmas, although I am tempted to leave one of the five-litre batches on the lees for even longer than a year. Talking of yeasts: I’ve let the juice ferment naturally without any additions*, relying solely on the wild yeasts found on the grape skins and in the vicinity.

(* Actually, I’m telling a slight lie here: I added a pinch of universal wine yeast (GV1) to one of the five-litre batches. This was a mistake. Fermentation looked like it was ending, and I thought it was a good idea to add some cultured yeast to ensure that the wine fermented to complete dryness. Nothing notable happened; the additional yeast just sank to the bottom. The wine was pretty dry already. I should have been more confident in the wild yeasts doing their job.)

I only want to make one addition of sulphur to the wine, if at all, and – if indeed necessary – this will be just before bottling. Hopefully, ageing on the gross lees followed by bottling without filtration or fining will allow me to keep SO2 to an absolute minimum. On the other hand, the lower acidity in Chasselas is less conducive to the zero-sulphur approach as a rule (with notable exceptions), so the insurance of a little SO2 will help me sleep better at night.

Now let me rewind to the days of harvest and pressing in October.

Spontaneous fermentation and use of the gross lees necessitate clean, healthy, immaculate grapes. Although I was extremely happy with the quality of the fruit, I had to be vigilant in weeding out the odd rotten or wasp-damaged grape here and there. Earwigs and ladybirds had also made their homes inside a few of the more densely packed grape bunches. In practice, this meant destemming every single grape by hand. It’s lucky I only have 50 vines instead of 500 or 5,000. I completed this job within a week and a half, filling up large plastic buckets with beautiful Chasselas grapes in the process. By its very nature, destemming involves puncturing the grape skins, so fermentation likely got going within the seven to ten days before I began pressing the grapes.

Originally, my intention was to use a wooden basket press for the next stage. I discarded this idea for logistical and hygienic reasons, because I thought that cleaning such a contraption would be a pain. Instead, I bought a home fruit presser that was comprised of a flat, round stainless steel pressing plate, an outer stainless steel container with a spout, and a perforated inner stainless steel container in which to fill a nylon bag full of grapes. The containers and the nylon bag proved more useful than the pressing mechanism itself. The latter needed more pressure to be exerted than it was designed to take (and I was physically able to achieve). In the end, I resorted to putting countless handfuls of fruit inside the nylon bag and pressing successively by hand. A bit like foot-stomping, but micro-boutique style.

The growing season itself was a tale of two halves, or maybe three thirds. Firstly, a late spring negated any frost risk. The weather until July was very pleasant if often a little cold at night. This was ‘act one’, so to speak. The early mornings tended to be quite dewy, but the vines handled these conditions well.

The beginning of act two coincided with the start of the school summer holidays, as the weather turned inclement. It rained a lot, and daytime temperatures were regularly below 20°C. The deluge probably eased off a little in August, but we generally remained stuck under a conveyor belt of unsettled weather systems arriving from the Atlantic. At this point, I wasn’t expecting to harvest any time before the end of October. Although the vines were still doing fine, I was slightly wary of grapes inside some of the larger, more tightly packed clusters potentially bursting if the rain continued.

Any worries dissipated in September – one of the warmest Septembers in living memory. High temperatures boosted ripeness, while abundant sunshine dried the grapes and kept all major issues at bay. I picked on 4 October.

The white mulch is lamb’s wool.

This all sounds like a walk in park, but the end result owed everything to the many hours I invested outside in the garden throughout the growing season. In the past couple of years, I have experimented with spraying various teas made from plants picked in the garden or sourced around the village: horsetail, nettles, comfrey, dandelion, willow, yarrow – that sort of thing. I like to think that the trace elements in these decoctions strengthen the vines to a certain extent. But when it comes to the best disease prevention, nothing beats keeping the vine canopy as light and airy as possible. I do this by plucking out all side (lateral) shoots that grow from the fruit-bearing primary shoots, ensuring that the canopy is spaced out as evenly as possible, and stripping off leaves to a certain extent. Vines like to do their own thing, and Chasselas vines in particular love throwing out lateral shoots. Keep these and the canopy can quickly turn into a mini-jungle. I only give lateral shoots a chance to grow at the top of the canopy, but even then I will intervene if necessary because these younger shoots are always more prone to mildew if the conditions are less than perfect – which was certainly the case in July and August.

I cannot emphasise enough how important how this mundane procedure of plucking off shoots is to me now. As a result, I barely sprayed anything all summer with the exception of three or four rounds of organic magnesium sulphate (Epsom salt) early on to curb any magnesium deficiencies – a particular problem in 2021.

Looking ahead to 2024, it won’t be long before I turn my mind to pruning again. Based on experiences thus far, I probably prefer laying down two productive canes (double Guyot method) over one (single Guyot). For my specific purposes, the vine and its canopy are more balanced with two canes. With about four or five shoots growing from just one cane, there will be a much bigger discrepancy in strength between the first and the last shoot on the cane. With two or no more than three shoots growing from each of two canes respectively, there is a lot more consistency despite the final bud showing a little more vigour than the first bud (I lay the canes down flat). Ideally, I would convert all the singles to doubles this year, but growth of the replacement canes for 2024 was erratic to say the least. The idea is for two spurs on either side of the head of the vine to produce one cane each for the next year, yet a lot of the vines simply refuse to play ball, only producing one viable cane at most. Then you have some weaker vines that are not yet up to full capacity and still have an incomplete ‘architecture’. These vines are even less interested in producing shoots where you want them to. “Vines will vine!” as someone I follow on Instagram, Dylan Grigg, writes, eluding to the vine’s evolutionary trait as a plant forever striving to grow higher and higher. I may start converting these weaker vines from Guyot to cordon/spur pruning to use this trait more to my advantage and build up strength through a higher proportion of old wood. Once I get these stragglers working for me, the vineyard should be well and truly established.