Make your own wine
Ever fantasised about owning your own vineyard?
Time Out meets a man who is living the dream on his south London allotment
Château Sydenham
The sun was high in the sky, and the grape-picking was in full swing. Afterwards, we sat at a table in the fading sunlight, drinking and discussing the liquid results of previous years; not the memories of late summer in the Loire Valley, but harvest time in the depths of Sydenham.
Hidden down a lane behind a row of respectable south London suburban houses are the New Kent allotments. Forming a large green breathing-space sloping down from Crystal Palace, they’d be impossible to find if you didn’t know they were there. Turning left at the end of the lane, you are surrounded by an immense vine, 40 feet long and winding its way above your head on a trellis arching over the path. Somewhere in its midst is Peter Springall, an 82-year-old retired engineer who has been growing grapes here since 1982.
Peter recalls buying the vine as a cutting for £9 back in 1982 from a nursery in the Kent countryside. Bunch after bunch of its black pearl grapes now hang from its strong stems. Springall has made all the wine-making machinery himself, everything from the mill that first crushes the grapes, to the wooden vat that holds the juice while it is fermenting.
On another site stretching up the hill, he produces cabernet sauvignon, a Swiss variety of muscat, and cascade. He’s got rid of two rows of white grapes, because he no longer cared for white wine. ‘When I first put these vines in in the 1980s, everyone said you couldn’t grow red wine in this country. But I’ve got a south-facing slope here, and you also have an extra 7 per cent warmth in the city.’
Peter Springall has been growing grapes here since 1982
A lifelong wine lover, Springall says he’s been making (and drinking) wine all his life. ‘I can remember in my youth making bottles of potato wine and stuff like that. Then I started beekeeping in 1947 and the obvious thing was to make mead from the honey. I suppose the vines just progressed from that.’
Springall claims the local climate of the site helps produce a good grape harvest. ‘The cloud over there,’ he says, pointing to the sky, ‘is coming from the west. By the time it reaches us, it will have dispersed. Then they reform over there, two miles on. It’s a mesoclimate. That all helps. Then we just seem to get the best of the sun on this slope because of the steep hill behind us leading up to Crystal Palace.’
But he is in no doubt that global warming has changed the growing and harvesting of vines over the past 20 years. The grapes are now picked at least a month earlier, at the start of October, rather than November. And the biggest danger to the grape harvest, late frost, has become almost non-existent. In the past, his vines were often covered with plastic in the early spring.
Korehan Dora is a more recent convert
Now other tenants of the New Kent allotments are eschewing pumpkins and potatoes for vines. Springall’s latest convert to the viticulture is fellow allotment-holder Korehan Dora, who came to London from Turkey with his diplomat father, in 1972, when he was 23 years old. An architect with Cable & Wireless in central London, he wanted something low maintenance. ‘My individual taste was to have chickens, because my grandad had chickens. But at an open day four years ago, I met Peter. There was some wine tasting, and I liked it.’
So he planted 150 vines bought from Planté de Vigne at an average of £2 per grafted root from France, and with Springall’s advice, chose a selection, including the maestro’s favourite rondo grape, adding regent and pinot noir. Already he has formed his own view:
‘I think I will switch from rondo to regent, since I’ve seen regent performing so well.’
The grapes are crushed by hand
Korehan has brought his own architectural approach to the nurturing of his huge crop. ‘I’m a bit meticulous. I kept all the vines in the garage for four months in the cold as I was told to do by the people I bought them from. The first thing I did was cover all the space between the lines where the vines would be with a dark weed-suppressant mat, to save me time weeding. Then I designed my own galvanised steel supports for the wires that the vines grow along. The advantage is that the brackets can go up and down, so that when you prune the vines, you can lower the brackets and the wires to the same height. Through the season, they will be gradually raised.’
The first year he went to the site three times a week to water his crop. But in this second year, he has not watered at all.
The roots of vines can go down as far as 40 feet and seek out their own water supply.
Black pearl grapes - among others
Korehan has surprised even himself this autumn. ‘I was told not to harvest any grapes in the second year, leaving the first harvest to the third year. But my regent have produced so many bunches that Peter agreed that I should pick them.’ Meanwhile, his Swiss-born wife has become an expert maker of dolmas, the Turkish delicacy made by wrapping vegetarian or meat mixtures in vine leaves. She picks the leaves at the right size, then washes and freezes them.
Springall reckons he drinks around half a bottle of his own red wine a day. ‘I just enjoy the taste of wine, especially with a meal. I’ll only have two or three glasses in a session… but then I could have more than one session in a day!’ In 2005, he produced 240 bottles from 560 pounds of his black pearl grapes. ‘It sounds a lot but it goes quite quickly. Whenever I go anywhere, people expect me to take a bottle. Two gallons disappeared at our Christmas lunch.’
The annual grape harvest is a very sociable affair. Springall and Dora put out the call to friends, neighbours, family and fellow allotment-holders to come down to help. Last year, a group of 18 spent a sunny October day picking and crushing. Someone brought along a beef casserole and apple pie, and the end of the harvest was celebrated with a communal feast.
The crushed, strained grapes sat for just over a fortnight in their sealed vat among the jumble of one of the allotment sheds, soaking in sugar until the colour is drawn from their skins. Now decanted into three 54-litre carboys – glass vats shaped like peardrops – they’ll wait in the shed until August when they’ll be bottled and, presumably, drunk. ‘When I put it in the carboys, it struck me as very drinkable then,’ says Pringal, ‘and I’m expecting it to only get better.’
Bottles and carboys are stored in the shed
So what does it taste like?
We gave Time Out’s wine critic Susan Low a couple of bottles to try in a blind tasting. How did they rate?
1. Kent House Red 2001
‘This has a bricky, dark colour like an aged wine. It also looks very cloudy, which is offputting. It smells aged, with raisin-like fruit character, and spicy cinnamon notes. It’s honey-sweet on the palate, but with appealing raisin flavours and good acidity. It’s a drinkable dessert wine, though I can’t identify what it is; it could be an LBV Port that has been stored badly.’
2. Kent House Dry Red 2005
(Sniffs it) ‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you? Is this actually made from grapes? It has a really odd aroma, like fruit gums, rhubarb and – I kid you not – traces of vomit. It smells very unappealing.
Do I have to taste this?’ (Tries it) ‘It tastes better than it smells, but the flavour is sharp, like an underripe strawberry-blackcurrant drink with piercing acidity. Is it some kind of fruit wine – or is it made from cabbages?’
The end of the harvest is celebration time
How to grow wine grapes in London
Springall’s tips for fine vines…
1. It goes against conventional wisdom, but I grow the red variety. It’s often said white grapes fare better in northern climes, but they are more prone to disease. Red grapes are hardier. I find they just need a bit of trimming from time to time, whereas the white ones need spraying to keep the mildew off.
2. Cuttings should always be rooted and grafted on to healthy rootstock to be resistant to phylloxera (nasty aphid-type root pests). I bury my cuttings in bundles till March or April and dig them up when they’ve got a root ball.Otherwise you can plant pot-grown vines at any time of year.
3. Plant straight into ground, preferably south-facing.
4. Though they can go down 40 foot, vine roots do not affect housing foundations so can be grown alongside your house.
5. Only water sparingly for the first year, then leave them alone.
6. Do not feed them with Growmore, lime, bonemeal or the like, as several books advise.
7. They will need good solid support. Use a six-foot-tall trellis and train the vines sideways.
8. Pay attention to frost warnings. Cover with plastic if there is a warning.
9. Pick off grapes in second year, but do not necessarily use them. Aim to use in the third year.
10. Prune in the winter. I use the spur-pruning method, which means cutting the vine where you want it to stop. There is another method, which I do not favour, where you cut off all the year’s previous wood.
Michael Wale. Photography Martin Daly
url: http://www.timeout.com/london/bars/features/2444.html
