Harvesting in Marlow

There's something about sitting at a long table with a blue check oilcloth in an open shed for lunch. Specially if it’s a winery. And if work is over for an hour or two. No restaurant can match this. Passing forklifts, tanks, grapes, hoses, barrels, family, customers, dogs, babies; the full team. Smells of grapes and Boeuf Bourguinon . Sounds by Planet Rock. This is Henry Laithwaite's new winery shed on Pump Lane, Little Marlow, Bucks.

I don't mind being the basket washer from dawn to dusk. I'm a bloke; so I like the Karcher pressure jet thing. Dead macho gun stuff. The ultimate big boy’s water pistol. I wash the sticky stuff off every grape basket after it’s emptied into the press, before it goes out to the vineyard again. Countless thousands of baskets. I got this job at La Clarière, our French vineyard, after I was relegated from winemaker in the '70's. Water-jetting specialist ever since, me. It’s the few days every year when my brain truly slows down to tick-over.

I love the work … mostly when it stops. And I can sit down for the wife's lunch and plenty wine. Barbara loves mass catering. Which is useful. 

This year our Bordeaux harvest was disappointing to say the least. So H's first proper English vintage is great compensation for us. But we have imported the proper French ways of doing things. No sandwich lunch thing here. Good wine cannot be made that way. The lunch is crucial. Soup, things on toast, stew, cheese, cake, coffee. That's how you make good wine and keep going to midnight – with some late-night pizza.

  

In three years the juice now flowing out of this press will be fizzing into someone's flute.Long time to wait, isn't it?  Not great cash flow, English fizz. From buying the field, planting vines to now; four years. From first juice today to finished wine; three more years. That's lots of money going out for seven years and none in.

But what a fantastic thing to do. Come and see. Pump Lane, Marlow.

  

30 Bulgarian/Romanians picking about 20 tons of Pinot Noir in two days. Fast. We have trouble keeping up. The press takes two tons a time and takes three and a half hours to run through its cycle.

So lots of long breaks for the cellar team … except the basket washer who can never really stop. So can't write more. Need to go fire my water gun. More Pinot coming in. Then in a few days, the Chardonnay.