Making A Start.

The last day or two when the sun has been shining the temperature has risen in the greenhouse to 22C. This time of year the greenhouse is used to raise vegetable plants, tomatoes, and annual flower plants for the garden.

Part of the greenhouse has a heated area that is used to keep the most tender seedlings cozy. Because I want the grapevine plants in the greenhouse to have the longest possible season (and because I'm itching to get the grape growing season underway) I have placed three potted cuttings in the heated area to force them into growth.

These first two are Regent and a Rayon D'Or that was propagated last year from a single bud.

This is another potted Regent.

Regent tends to be a slow in getting wood to a fruiting size so the longer the growing season the more time it has to make growth. We should see the first sign of bud swelling in a couple of weeks.

Scotland and the North Of England.

So can grapes be grown outside in the north of England or in Scotland. You bet they can Obviously the further north the less realistic chance of ripening later ripening varieties but that doesn't mean you can't grow some truly excellent grapes even in scotland.

The first point to mention is that the more shelter you can offer to the vines the greater your chance of success. There are commercial vineyards in Yorkshire and Lancashire growing grapes and making wine in open vineyards. Just think what you can achieve at home even further north.

So what varieties will give northern english and scottish gardeners the best chance of quality grapes. The UK big four - Rondo, Solaris, Madeleine Angevine, and Siegerrebe are always the first to be recommended, especially for wine.

  But there are plenty of other varieties, particularly for those who want eating grapes, including Queen Of Esther, Gagarin Blue, Agat Donski and one even for the far north of scotland, Hasanky Sladky (also known as Baltica). You can even grow seedless grapes. Somerset Seedless is the one recommended for short growing seasons. It has an excellent flavour too.

Excellent grapes are being grown in scandinavia, places like Finland, Sweden and Denmark, that share a similar climate to scotland and the north of england. You just need to choose the right variety.

Have a look at these links for some inspiration of how it is possible to get quality grapes in the north. Don't be put off by eastern european varieties. They are bred for northern climates like ours.

http://kyttalanviinitila.com/english/varieties.shtml

http://home.online.no/~l-bentel/Sorter-eng.html

Flexibility Training.

You may be asking yourself why the vines are being trained the way they are. Particularly the four arm training system when almost everything you read about grape training speaks of  one or two arms. The answer is flexibility. Also many of these texts are for open vineyards but I'm talking about home production.

Unfortunately in Britain the weather at flowering time cannot always be relied on. Yet it is the most crucial time for berry set and deciding potential harvest. No fruit set equals no grapes that year.

About one year in every three we have a wet cool period when the vines are in flower resulting in poor berry set and therefore a reduced harvest. Think of all those wet Wimbeldon fortnights and you get the idea. Grapes like warm sunny weather during flowering.

Some varieties, Madeleine Angevine and Chardonnay for example, are better at setting grapes in damp, cool weather. But many will only set a much reduced number of grapes in such conditions.

So by allowing more buds to form shoots you increase the chance of regulating the crop according to the season. In a good year with a high fruit set bunches can be cut off so only the planned number remain. In a bad year when the bunches are only one third or half set you have more bunches left that could produce almost the same planned yield.

This is good for you and for the vine since  a poor crop load unually results in over vigorous shoot growth.

Leaving more shoots also means more canopy of course. Grape vines in this country need more foliage to ripen the grapes. But foliage should not impede the grapes so a canopy management system should be thought about. I will talk about this later when the vines are in active growth but it really isn't too difficult.

Underestimated Brant.

Brand is a variety that is much underestimated by most growers, dismissing it as a good ornamental plant that produces sweet black fruits.

Yet although ripening late, mid to late october here in the south of England, it makes a very good rose or light red wine with a distinct cherry aroma.

I mentioned before that the Brand vines at home are being replaced by Dornfelder. This is because despite being a good variety Brand is liable to uneven ripening so you have to go over the vines a number of times before you harvest them all.

Here is what is left of the Brant in the garden. You can see by the size of the trunk how big it was. At the end of this season this vine will be grubbed up as the Dornfelders will have grown to need the space.

This next picture is of the Brandt vines on the allotment. Each vine has two fruiting canes like a double guyot training method. The allotment Brants ripen very late but they do ripen most years.

More Regent - Two & Three.

Here are the other two main Regent vines. The one I'm calling number two is trained to the, by now familiar to you, four arm system.

Looking at number three you can see the main stem with four spurs and an extension cane that will itself form four spurs this year. I hope to crop sixteen to twenty bunches this year from it.

I also have two small recently planted Regent vines as well as two replacements if these two grow weakly. As you can tell I really like the Regent variety. Vitis Regent was named after the famous Regent black diamond housed at the Louvre, Paris.

Regent. Main Vine.

This Regent vine is the first one bought and the stock from which all the other Regent vines come from. It is over ten years old and has produced some excellent fruit. It is hardy and never suffers from mildew.

These grapes make a very good deep red wine, more south of france than bordeaux, Fitou or Cotes du Russillon perhaps. They ripen well and are usually ready to pick around the first week of october. I would highly recommend it as a good variety to plant.

Compare with Madeleine Angevine - spot the difference eh?

The training system is a mix of cane pruning and spur pruning. Cane pruned on the trellise and a cordon that straddles the arch over the path. It works quite well and it is the only vine that you can walk underneath and look up at the hanging bunches.

Cropload will be decided once the vine begins growing as last year it didn't grow optimally because of magnesium deficiency. Regent it a variety that is prone to this nutrient deficiency but is easily treated with epsom salts. I treated it with this late last summer and the new growth was better. I shall give it another application just before bud break that will hopefully correct the problem.

Here is what they look like ripening a week or ten days away from picking. Experience has taught me that Regent is one of those grape varieties that will grow bigger berries in a sheltered spot than if grown in an open vineyard.

Madeleine Angevine. A Special Lady.

Madeleine Angevine, or rather the british version of it is perfectly adapted to our climate. Hardy, tough late budding in the spring and an early harvest. Reliable is the best word to describe this special lady.

Web sources always mention how it will set fruit even when the flowering period is cool and wet. I can certainly confirm this meaning that you will get a good amount of Madeleine Angevine grapes every season. I can also confirm the quality of the wine. It is excellent and is good in the bottle for at least two years - I haven't been able to keep it any longer than that before drinking it.

Because of its early ripening it can be grown very well in the north of britain, even in scotland given a sheltered site. Don't think you can't grow grapes in the north or in scotland because by choosing the right varieties and the right spot you can. Madeleine Angevine is grown successfully in scandinavia for example.

Here is Madeleine Angevine pruned at winter rest.

This is what she will look like in september. The yellow sticky traps are to prevent wasps.

And this is a bottle of 2009 Madeleine Angevine wine. It's as good as store bought wine but more satisfying as it came from my own grapes.

 Cheers.

High Hopes For Dornfelder.

The last two years I have been replacing the Brant grapevines in the garden with Dornfelder. Brant is a much underrated grape yet makes a rather good wine with the aroma of cherries. It's one drawback with me is its uneven ripening meaning several passes over the vines at harvest.

Dornfelder should be better as it ripens a little earlier and with larger bunches that make a very worthwhile wine. Eventually the Dornfelder are destined to be blended with Acolon as they both share a common parentage. This should make a good quality wine.

There are two Dornfelder vines this is the first.

And this is the second.

I hope to get four to six bunches from the two vines this year so they can concentrate on growing strongly for the following year.

One thing to note is that the Chardonnay and the Phoenix vines were exactly the size last year that the Dornfelders are now so by this time next year these Dornfelder vines could easily be as strong.

Spot The Difference - Chardonnay.

Everyone knows Chardonnay. Visit any supermarket wine section or off licence (liqour store if you prefer) and you can be pretty sure the majority of white wines available are either made entirely from Chardonnay or it is a large component of the blend.

It is a grape grown the world over including here in the UK where it is mainly used in our world class sparkling wines. These wines have regularly beaten french champagnes in blind tasting.

The main problem with it is that it is one of the last varieties to ripen here, not such a problem for sparkling wine as the grapes are better for that purpose if they are not totally ripe. However I like chardonnay wines full bodied with all the associated chardonnay flavours whether oaked or unoaked.

That's why I have my Chardonnay vines planted in the sunniest spot against a fence so that they will ripen fully in order to make the best wine. Sometimes ripening up to three weeks earlier than field grown Chardonnay.

Here you can see the Chardonnay vine trained the same way as the Phoenix vine. Like the Phoenix I plan to produce 20-40 bunches this year but since the bunches are small eventually I should be able to let the vine carry more fruit than this.

Further along the fence there are three more small Chardonnay vines that in years to come will produce up to eight bottles of chardonnay wine. It will be interesting to make oaked and un-oaked chardonnay versions and taste the difference between them.

An Old Technique Revisited.

Pot layering was a technique used by victorian gardeners to produce well sized edible grapes and in quantity on a small plant. It was used primarily in large country houses in order that the master of the house could amaze guests who were able to pick fresh grapes right off the plant. Whole dinner parties were arranged around them and some dining tables had pot sized holes in the center of them to accommodate the grape laden vine in its pot.

It was done by feeding a long shoot still attached to the vine through a hole in the bottom of the pot, filling the pot with soil. The shoot would grow and produce grapes as well as more roots within the pot. When the grapes were ready to be displayed the shoot was severed from the parent vine.

I'm doing the same thing here with one of the arms from the Phoenix vine. The idea here is not to produce grapes but to see if the shoot can root in a pot and grow more vigorously, and therefore come into bearing earlier, than cuttings rooted in the ground.

One problem is that I want the Phoenix to produce a good crop of grapes yet obviously some of its energy will be diverted by the shoot in the pot. Hopefully by the time the grapes are beginning to ripen enough roots will have formed in the pot that it can safely be severed leaving all the vine's strength to ripen the fruit.

We shall see.

Will These Rise From The Ashes?

In front of the Phoenix vine I am trying to strike these six Phoenix cuttings. They have been given no special treatment, they have simply been inserted into the ground to around half their depth when the vine was pruned last month.

I tend to make the cuttings longer than recommended - these are around 16 inches long. Buried to around half their depth there is eight or nine inches of stem above and below the ground.

Doing cuttings like this gives the cuttings more retained goodness in the stem to produce good root and top growth on any that strike. A 40%-60% strike rate is a fair average. Sometimes depending on the variety (some varieties strike more easily than others) a much higher rate of rooting success can be achieved.

The best three rooted cuttings are destined for the allotment as I want to increase my plantings of this useful variety.

First Phoenix.

Phoenix is an excellent variety for the UK climate. It is strong growing, well behaved and disease resistant. I have never needed to spray it against mildew. It produces good sized grapes that can be used for wine or eating. I use them for wine.

You will notice it is growing against a fence. This ripens the grapes up to three weeks earlier than if it was planted in open ground - mid september rather than early october.

As you can also see this vine, and some of the others are trained to a four arm system. I will go more into vine training in another post but training them like this will hopefully spread out the canes and fruit exposing them both to the sun and the air.

This year is this vines first "full" crop planning for 30-40 bunches. Last year I allowed five bunches and the previous year only one bunch so all the vine's energy went in to building up the roots and top growth. You can see how strong the stems are.

In the spring new shoots will be restricted to five per arm, twenty shoots in all, for a maximum of 40 bunches as each shoot could produce two bunches.

List Of Varieties.

Since there are a few weeks to go before the grape vines wake from their winter slumbers it is a good time to detail the grape varieties I'm growing. They are all at different stages of development. Some have been fruiting for a number of years, some have only bagan fruiting recently, while others are young and have yet to produce any fruiting wood. Hopefully some of those will do so in the coming growing season.

I also have a number of new exciting varieties acquired as cuttings. It will be interesting to see how many of these take and how they develop over the next few years.

There are also some experimentation with training systems, pruning, proagation and other techniques. Grapeman hopes to detail these over time.

So these are the current list of varieties:

Fruiting Vines - Regent, Chardonnay, Phoenix, Madeleine Angevine, Dornfelder, Brant.

Developing Vines - Rondo, Acolon, Rayon D'or, Castel 19637, Merzling, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir. Gamay Tienturier, Perlette, Lakemont, Superior Seedless, Muscat Bleu.

New Cuttings - Solaris, Cabernet Cortis, Kyoho, Beauty Seedless, Glenora, Interlaken, Suffolk Red, Agat Donski, Auguste Louise, Gagarin Blue, Oberlin 565

As you can see twenty nine varieties in all. That's quite a collection.

Over the next few weeks I will discuss them individually, posting pictures so you can see where we are with each one and watch them develop through the various growth stages.

It will give me great pleasure to see them all develop.

Introduction.

After growing a small number of grapevines over the last ten years or so I have recently become far more interested in growing grapes both better and in greater variety. So much so that I now have well over twenty different varieties growing at home in the garden and on my allotment.

While the UK is not thought of as having a suitable climate for grape growing, not least among a large section of the population at large, we do have an ever increasing number of successful commercial vineyards that produce good quality, even excellent, wines in all accepted winemaking styles.

Another surprising thing is the huge number of varieties that will not only thrive in the british climate but produce good quality fruit whether it is for wine, fresh eating or even for raisins, there are a number of excellent varieties that will perform well for you.

For those in the UK I hope to show how good grapes can be grown in this country, even in the north. And for those elsewhere to give an insight of how grapes can be grown successfully in a cool unpredictable climate.