September first came through with a very California Dreamin’ feeling, and if I’m honest I’m both thrilled and sad to see the change of the season. The winds cut a little more each morning while the sun is still strong enough to force us out of our LWV hoodies by mid-afternoon. The leaves are making their transition into golden hues, and we are still waiting for the grapes to ripen. We’re now in that part of the season where Tom and Cam are doing their best to keep the grapes healthy and happy while they work on developing lots of sugar – which we can then turn into the classic Little Wold Vineyard wine you all know.
For the vineyard team, most of this week has been a mix of working outside before being quickly rushed inside to hide from freak showers or strong winds. A much-needed trip to Fulbeck was made on Wednesday – meaning I slept in the car on the hour-long journey home, because I am nothing if not an opportunist for a good nap – where Tom and Cam trimmed back the vines using the side-knife on the John Deere and a strimmer. After they took the worst of the growth off I went in with a pair of secateurs to open up the canopy so as to make it easier for any moisture on the grapes to dry out. Unfortunately, as is often the case for our Fulbeck site, there are signs of disease across some of the varieties we have there. In spite of this, we’re still happy with how Fulbeck is coming along; Tom even thinks the Solaris grapes there will be some of the first we pick this season! In my less-established eyes, predictions like these that Tom, Henry and Cam make feel a little like receiving a reading from someone in touch with some higher spirit. Perhaps it’s just a farmer thing?
As aforementioned, when the weather decided to play its usual tricks on us, we ended up in the winery. This allowed me and Cam the time to work on filtering our 2023 Barely Hill and blend our Three Cocked Hat – which has turned into quite the operation. When we first pressed our red grapes they ended up in three ‘batches’. By the end of fermentation we had three reds split across two tanks and some barrels. As the time comes for us to blend these together, I get out the whiteboard and devise a plan to evenly split the wine into one blend, across three tanks. When you look at the not-so-professional plan on said whiteboard, it feels very reminiscent of one of those hopelessly unfair puzzles about trying to move a fox, hen and some corn from one side of a river to the other. Except my cargo is red wine, and rather than the fox trying to eat the hen, I’m trying to stop oxygen interacting with the wine on its blending journey (which is actually just as terrifying as a fox trying to eat a hen, if you were to ask any of us here at LWV).
While you may think that the arrival of September would mean a winding down of events for us at the Tasting Room, it has turned out to be quite the opposite. Alice is currently manning the helm of the cellar door today, after completing a casual twelve-hour-plus shift for a wedding the day before. Alice is somewhat of a force to be reckoned with when it comes to these critical moments, and for many years she led the events single-handedly, never faltering on the quality of service just because it was her third wedding on the trot in two weeks. The extravaganza of a wedding held last night is the first one of two this week, although with a wedding on the following Monday – on top of the usual cellar door and tastings – it would be fair to assume that our events team are really in the thick of it at the moment. In other events news though, we have become official members of Visit Hull and East Yorkshire (or VHEY, for short). This is great news for us in regards to corporate events, as we are now included on a list – alongside some other very exciting businesses – that will be promoted in and around the area. And did I mention that we’ve also been shortlisted for a REYTA (Remarkable East Yorkshire Tourism Awards, for those who weren’t in the know… like me)? These awards, as described on the VHEY website, are: ‘to recognise the significance of tourism to this area and celebrate the quality of businesses and individuals working within it.’ You can probably imagine our excitement and gratitude at making it to the finalist’s stage. Better yet, can you imagine the internal scream/dance/jig I did when Alice told me that we were finalists in the Remarkable Local Producer category? While our wines have won awards previously, it is often our weddings and hospitality that makes its way into awards such as this. Being put forward for local producer is a massive honour for us, coming up to our third year of producing the wine ourselves; but additionally this is a huge win for Tom and Cam, who have worked for years on our vineyards, tending to them in every weather pattern you can conjure, who have allowed us to have excellent produce which we had made into wine at Half Penny Green, and now by our own hands. So naturally I think we need to all give those two a huge congrats for this – no matter the outcome, these two have achieved something kind of incredible here, and the rest of us at LWV are super proud of them!
This last little bit of news has only just arrived with me as I’m typing this out, but I just saw this on our Instagram story (you can stalk— I mean, peruse our Instagram page here, if you like). A couple of months ago you may recall I mentioned we had some very cool, very special visitors to LWV? Channel Five’s newest show, ‘Yorkshire Great and Small with Dan and Helen’ is coming to the small screen this week! You can catch the show, which documents all of the amazing parts of Yorkshire we love so dearly, every Thursday at 8pm. And who knows (we do), you may see some faces you recognise (ours) in one particular episode (I don’t have that specific information to hand but it’s a good incentive to tune in each week in case it’s the one).
And now it’s time for Cam on Cam, with this cute little guy! I’m calling any and all photos Cam takes of bugs a ‘creatures feature’, because it rhymes and that somehow makes the concept of staring at creepy crawlies less intimidating to me. Did you know that caterpillars generally have only six legs? However, they were also blessed (if you can call it that…) with up to five pairs of shorter leg-like growths (called prolegs on the Woodland Trust website) that have hooks on them. These are what help the caterpillars hang on to things, and gives them that wave-like motion we all know and love.
