What I know about making wine could be written on a beer mat. Don’t get me wrong, I know plenty about wine for example, I know that there are three types of grapes; red, white and rosé…..or do they mix the red and white ones to get rosé? To be quite frank, does it matter as long as it tastes good? Oh, yes I was joking about the rosé grapes. We inherited a few vines with the manoir. I don’t think they were meant to be productive, more for show. Although with a biodynamic chateau producing winery as our neighbour providing the backdrop to what we hope will be our natural swimming pool why would we need a few vines?

However, I was rather proud of our haul albeit we had nothing to do with growing them. I picked the grapes because our neighbour, the chateau family, were picking their grapes. I admit that I didn’t need the band of workers that they are using but nevertheless I am staggered amount of grapes that we harvested. The question now, is what do I do with them? We are hardly likely to bother the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée for accreditation or whatever it is they award. Like most things at the moment, the grapes have gone on the compost heap, which is about the size of a small bungalow, not one of the sheltered housing types ones, a pretty good sized small one!

We now have to watch to see when the chateau chap starts pruning; we might have to Google how to prune a vine! I’ll let you know.