December at Marlings.  The New Forest Vineyard.

December is when I should be out there pruning. I always plan on starting before the kids break up, but somehow it never seems to work out. There are still things going on in the Winery, with racking of the 2008 wines and general tidying up to be done. We have also just bottled some of 2007's Red wine, which is now ready for sale.

It's days like today, bright and cold, which are ideal for pruning. Well, it would be ideal if we hadn't had a monsoon over the last couple of days. So I shall give it a miss as I don't really want to go onto the vineyard when it's this wet underfoot.

It looks like myself and 2 colleagues will be leasing another New Forest Vineyard which is about 5 acres in size. As soon as we have signed on the dotted line I will update this Blog to let you know which vineyard it is, and what we are going to be doing with 2 New Forest Vineyards. This will give us more flexibilty to create different English Wines, including a sparkling English Wine.

So, I have just landed myself with even more pruning..... Those electric secateurs are looking more attractive by the minute as a Christmas present to myself! The vineyard is designed with a trellis system using the Geneva Double Curtain, or GDC. This is new to me, so Roger and I will be over there tomorrow seeing how quickly we can prune a row to get an estimate of the time it will take us to do the whole vineyard.

I'll update the Blog later this week on how it all went....