Making wine is not something you schedule in on a random Tuesday. You have to have to choose your grapes. Then wait a year for the vines. Then you plant. Then you nurture and maintain vines, in our case for 4 years. We did all of this in the humble service of nature while also being very much at her mercy. This first harvest is small and joyful. Our farm is so much healthier and happier as a result of all the work we have done to bring it back into a state of abundance. The wine-making started in mid-October, and when it is ready to drink in spring it really will be a celebration of our part in this recovering ecosystem.
Can wine really do all that? With a lot of love, total commitment to the soil, and the support of our incredible team and community? You bet.
Was it in my last year at university? During a job interview I was asked if I pictured myself working on Wall Street in forty years time... I replied, really to my own surprise, 'No. I think I will be growing grapes and making wine." My room-mates loved this story - Liz, Pauline and Cathy - and clearly we talked about the wine idea a lot from then on, as Cathy gave me this, as a Christmas present in 1998.
So this really is a dream that has been 27 years in the making.
The idea solidified in my early years of work, in Hong Kong. This was when I devoured all kinds of books about wine, from Nicolas Joly's biodynamic vine growing manual, Wine from Sky to Earth, to Hugh Johnson's Story of Wine (among several of Hugh's books) and also, I must admit Wine for Dummies... When again, a supportive friend Lei-shin, wrote this inscription in the Vintner's Art?
And then in 2015 Elvis & I decided to broaden our mission at Elvis & Kresse and see if we could operate entirely regeneratively. This led us to New Barns Farm in 2020 and to the south facing chalky slopes and soil studies that pointed in one very clear direction.
After years of laying dormant, it was time. In 2021 we ordered the vines, in 2022 we planted. This first year could have been the last - the drought was so terrible and the heat wave in August so pronounced - that we genuinely thought they would all die. Amazingly, of the nearly 12,000 vines and more than 3000 trees, more than 80% survived. They largely stayed dormant, but didn't really grow.
We have pursued an entirely regenerative approach here. We use no 'cides' - no herbicides, pesticides, fungicides... no death. We also don't use synthetic fertilisers. We make our own compost, entirely from locally available wastes like our neighbour's horse manure and farm shop food waste. We then cold brew this into compost tea, and that is how we are bringing life back to the very poor soil that was here when we came. We add life, and that means the soil gets deeper, more resilient, and holds more carbon.
If I started making a list of everyone who has supported this dream then this post would end up being way too long but we have had a lot of help with planning, planting, weeding, mulching, composting, pruning, watering through the drought (the summer of 22, the year we planted, really could have killed everything), mentoring, and so much moral support. Without David, our vineyard manager, the whole crew here, and the wider team of friends, neighbours and family (many of whom spent weekends and holidays staking, tubing, mulching, pruning or planting trees), I am not sure we would have ever made it to this week.
But we did.
And what happens in this very busy period?
Well, let me walk you through and show you the process.
First there were the major preparations, working with Nikki, who has amazingly come from Kelowna (where the grapes have not recovered from the deep freeze frost of 2024), to help us with this first vintage. Nikki advised on the equipment required to set up a rudimentary, but scalable winery. We bought tanks and presses, and converted part of the Brew Barn, where we make our compost tea, into an insulated and easy to clean fermenting space. We made covers for the open top fermenters, we studied how to clean enzymatically (rather than chemically), and we kept testing and testing for the sugar levels to be right.
Waiting for sugar is hard. The grapes look right, the acid levels are right, and they taste good too! This is the problem. They taste good to us, and they taste really good to the wasps and birds that also live at New Barns Farm... so in the last weeks of waiting we also lose a lot of volume. But hey, we love to give back, sharing is in our DNA. I think we will call this nature's share for now.
October 13th: Nikki arrives and inspects the winery. We are all systems go.
Nikki Callaway, our wonderful winemaking guru, in the vineyard
October 14th: The whole team is either out in the vines or managing the workshop and we manage to bring in all the white grapes. We picked 234kg in total, across 24 baskets. Of these baskets only one was Rinot, the rest are all Souvignier Gris. Rather than make just a handful of Rinot, we squish them all together and leave overnight to add depth and flavour from the skins. This first 'squish' was by foot, and as per Nikki's advice, we christened the grapes by drinking Champagne while stomping and pouring a good measure into the open top fermenter...
October 15th: We bring in some of the grape must to kick start fermentation in the warmer workshop. Then we press the lot and get it all into one of our variable capacity tanks. Everything gets a good clean down, in preparation for the red grape harvest.
October 16th: We start picking again - and this time it is all red. The weather is a little warmer, making it easier on the crew, but these grapes have had more pressure from birds and wasps and bees too. We wonder if these cheeky neighbours of ours find the thinner skins easier to penetrate, or if they are drawn in by their almost black colour. There would have been a lot more red than white, but with many of the berries picked off (birds) or drained of their juice (wasps and bees), the ratio of stem to grapes is too high... instead of stomping on whole bunches we de-stem first, by hand, and then give the grapes a good trodding before tucking in for the night. In total we had 191kg of Pinotin, sadly all of the Cabaret Noir was 'for the birds'.
October 17th: We do a full analysis of all the juice, and work out our next steps... we punch down the reds, and have a lovely satisfactory walk around the vineyard. It is a real relief to have everything picked.
Over the next few days we check temperature, specific gravity, sugar levels and we do a lot of sniffing and sipping. We don't want funky, off smells. We want CO2, we want yeast, we want vibrant juice. My take on the early smells, before the temperature went up and sugar went down, was of church (stale bread and wine) and banana bread. Apparently this is a great sign. The reason you get heat is that the yeast, naturally occurring in our lovely unsprayed grapes, is starting to eat the sugar and convert it into alcohol. At first the yeast population is small, but then it grows, and the temperature rises accordingly. You can hear the liquids popping and fizzing, you can taste the fizzy first hints of alcohol on your tongue. If you want to know your alcohol content you measure the specific gravity of the juice on day one, then subtract the gravity reading at the end of fermentation, then multiply by 131.25... that gives you your ABV, or alcohol by volume.
It is hard not to get obsessed with our little winery. It is warm, cozy, and literally full of the fruits of our labour... tanks of liquid potential.
This is not the end of the story, or even the end of the season. We now have to monitor the wine, keep an eye on fermentation, make sure the variable capacity lids stay pumped up and tight, and wait to rack, and re-rack the juice as it becomes wine. There is cold stabilisation and heat stabilisation and the risk of contamination and any number of things that can go wrong... and that is just this year, as we wait for the wine to be ready to bottle, in Spring, and then ready to drink a little later.
Next year more of the vines will be robust, and ready to produce grapes. Those that already produced this year could potentially carry more grapes. We will still be at the whim of nature, we know all too well that weather can make or break us. Or the voles may come again to munch the weaker vines... And then when everything is ripe we have to worry about birds, wasps and bees... We will gradually find our way, steadily adjusting to and meshing with the natural rhythm of the seasons, even as they are increasingly disrupted by climate change.
All I can tell you is that this is just the beginning of the second act, one that I hope will last for decades, and that will taste as incredible as we all feel in this first harvest week.
At Elvis & Kresse, we believe real change happens through collaboration. The Company We Keep celebrates the inspiring sustainable brands that share our mission to reduce waste and create positive impact. Discover the stories of Reskinned, Clipper Teas, Wasted Kitchen, Cook, and B Corp, organisations reimagining how business can be a genuine force for good.
