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Scaynes Hill Village
I had such an enjoyable couple of hours last week! I spent the morning picking grapes for the wine harvest, and I have never known two and a half hours to go so quickly. It was a beautiful warm, sunny morning in October and the work, which consisted of snipping off bunches of white grapes, cleaning off the ones affected by the botrytis fungus and throwing the good ones into a crate, was so relaxing. I was in the middle of the vineyard, and was surrounded by about 10 students who provided the main workforce, although I could only see two or three at a time. The others were hidden from view by the vines.
Rock Lodge Vineyard
24 October Posted by Mike Lavelle
There are a lot of new vines in the Scaynes Hill vineyard, and there is still more space for planting. A new vine takes about three years to start producing grapes, but will continue to improve for several years after that, as its roots become more established. The "terroir" in the vineyard is clay on sandstone, and in fact there is a small quarry there where one can see a deep layer of sandstone, which consists of multiple layers, each about an inch deep. Apparently, the roots of the vines can find their way in between the fissures in the sandstone.
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Plumpton College is now the leading wine-business and wine-growing college in the country. One of the students that I was working with is in his fifties. He worked in The City until about a year ago, and he has ten acres of land near Tunbridge Wells. He is planning to start his own vineyard. It is nice to know that he and the other students will be learning their trade partly in Scaynes Hill.
By the way, I had a bottle of extremely good rosé, Cloudy Ridge, a few months ago. It was made from the grapes from Scaynes Hill vineyard and can be purchased from South Downs Cellars, the off licence in Lindfield High Street.
The sun was surprisingly warm for the time of year, and the leaves on the vines were just starting to change colour, so that there was a patchwork of colours from bright green through khaki to beige. There was continual gentle banter from the younger students, with a lot of laughter, but by the end of the morning there was a trailer full of crates of grapes. Apparently, the work was much slower that morning because of the extra time involved in cleaning off the diseased grapes. The day before, the students had been harvesting some of the black grapes, and they could just walk along the vines cutting the bunches and putting them straight into the crates. I have often thought that it would be interesting, and a lot of fun, to be involved in the grape harvest in France, but this was not France, it was…Rock Lodge Vineyard in Scaynes Hill.
Plumpton College took over the vineyard in Scaynes Hill several years ago. Over the past 10 years they have been planting more and more vines, and now there is a total of about seven hectares (one hectare is about 2.4 acres). The original Rock Lodge Vineyard consists of two hectares planted in the 1960s. The College has two other vineyards, one in Ditchling and one at the College itself, but these are much smaller than the one in Scaynes Hill. Several different varieties have been planted, both black and white, and many of these are German, including Müller Thurgau, Rechensteiner and Dornfelder, although there are also French varieties such as Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. Some research is being carried out into the optimum spacing of the vines, and of course with the different varieties it will be possible to see which ones thrive on the conditions in Scaynes Hill.
