Chateau Abingdon 2007

[ParaHandy]

Last year advice wus sought on encouraging a decent grape harvest from my vine with a few bottles of plonk to come. Fat lot of use it was to. Anybody got any experience? Any bod suggesting copious watering as per last year can go and get stuffed ... !

I have heard that cutting off one out of three grape bunches will help ...

 

[ChrisE]

Look here you drunken sot, the last thing you need to be considering is drinking more wine. You've got plenty of water near you now, suggest you bottle it up ready for the hose-pipe ban which can't be far away...

 

[jimi]

Drink loads of decent wine and piss on the vine!

 

[stevepick]

Para,

I am a regular on a wine forum. One of the bods there, Ben Rotter, is a winemaker. His website http://www.brsquared.org/wine/index.htm probably has all the info you need. Thining bunches early in development is usually done to improve the concentration of the grapes ( ie more flavour per grape). I doubt your vine will ever need watering in the UK, its more a case of preventing rot/mildew on the grapes here. You can spray grapes with a copper sulphate ( bordeaux mixture)solution to prevent rot etc.
Hope this helps.

Steve

 

[longjohnsadler]

See post on cocktails above

 

[ParaHandy]

thank you for such a useful, informative, courteous and helpful post .. unlike the other useless gits efforts!

 

[BrendanS]

he'll soon be trained in the ways of the forum, and post to an acceptable standard! /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[Twister_Ken]

First trick is to stop the birds eating them. Grapes, that is.

 

[LymingtonPugwash]

Been growing lots of grapes for years now in Greece and one thing you don't need is lots of water! Especially in the UK!
One thing you will need lots of in the UK which will be missing is sunshine! Is your vine in a greenhouse? If so, is the greenhouse heated? If it's not in a greenhouse, then whereabouts in the UK are you?

Then it also depends on the strain of vine you're growing. Some types love it very hot and very dry, others need a tiny bit of water..... still others like high alkaline content soil and others low, or high phosphate or low /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif
Finally, the winter preparation of the vine is very important as well.... do you know how to prune the vine? That will make a tremendous difference to the volume and size of the crop you get.
In short, you'll probably find it easier and cheaper to buy some £1 bottles of cheap and nasty plonk which will still taste better than anything you're likely to make! /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

If you do ever get to the stage of treading your own grapes to make wine, do make sure that you don't throw away the 'leftovers', the skin, pulp and twiggy bits..... scrape them all up off the floor and the bottom of your yellow wellies which you used to tread the grapes and place them into a 45 gallon drum with just enough water to cover the mess, then losely cover the drum and leave it for 4 to 6 months, making sure that there is just a little water kept in it. Don't worry about the millions of tiny fruit flies which will be in the barrel, or about any rats etc which might drown in the mixture over the 6 months...... At the end of it's time, distil the lot and you'll have a really strong spirit which you can (unadvisably) drink neat in the tiniest drams, to rot your internal organs and cook your brain..... alternatively, you can use it as the base to make other alchoholic drinks! /forums/images/graemlins/ooo.gif

 

[thalassa]

"Chateau Abingdon"?.... will there be varieties as "Selection Emgeebee", "Millesime Emgeebee GT" (for the connoisseurs ), "Pinot Midget" etc...
Would give new impetus as the Morland brewery is long defunct too.