Zam Baring, Author at The Grange

Gratifyingly, the panorama I have managed to film on my camera draws an awestruck reaction on the family whatsapp group. JEEEESUS being the general tone. I am quite proud of this little film, especially as I find the phone button counter-intuitive and tend to find I have filmed the ground. Actually the ground is, in this case, the point.

We picnicked by the ditch but neither of us said it aloud until a long time later...

When we went to visit the Grand Canyon about thirty years ago Zam suggested we view it “from the other side.” We drove, for hours, we parked, we walked. And then we peered at a wide-ish ditch. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Yes” he didn’t sound it. “But in the films people fly airplanes through it and this….” I hesitated, thinking someone with a more athletic build could jump across it. We picnicked by the ditch but neither of us said it aloud until a long time later: we had actually failed to find something you can see from the moon.

My panoramic film shows a hole in the ground that is over 100 metres long and about 30 metres wide. Zam makes sweeping movements with his arms to describe areas for fermenting, bottling, storing, labelling… we nod as he explains entrances and exits and that the winery, on its incredible chalk plateau, has to be finished before this year’s harvest. JEEESUS we think, all over again.

Amazingly you can hardly see it till you come across it. But it feels like you could see it from the moon.

Not everybody loves the newly pimped landrover that our old neighbour Robert has transformed from a beaten up lightweight, short-wheelbase, Series III into an idiosyncratic mobile bar. But Zam does. When his sister Rose asked to borrow it, freshly painted and ready to go he was delighted to share the joy. She rang 20 minutes later having broken down going up a hill and was now taking shelter at the nearest house. The occupants of this looked amused but not particularly surprised. “They all have their little ticks” the farmer and Zam agreed fondly.

“They all have their little ticks”

In order to prove that it just takes a bit of this (pump the brakes), and that (change gear at exactly the right moment and lean forward), Zam drove it home.

He booked himself and it into various Christmas fairs but got Covid and so asked genius winemaker Harry to take it to Wiltshire. The landrover averages about 35 mph. The tailback on the A303 became considerable. The wind and cold whistled round Harry’s head. The brakes were hair-raising. He didn’t want to drive it back again. When Zam recovered he went to collect it and arrived home pale and chastened. The “quirks” were, he now admitted, considerable. It went into the local garage for remedial attention and now it’s back. As a bar it’s rather wonderful. As transport… he’s on his own.

Zam tries to round up people to take part in two photo shoots… he wants young people but not too young and older people who are not too old. I am too old but he’s desperate. The photographer, Tom, has been photographing the vineyard since this adventure began ten years ago and is now so successful that he needs booking months in advance. Whatever the weather. The weather actually turns out to be the last nice day I can remember so the first shoot is an afternoon of picnics and swimming. The older group gather in a tent at the Grange Festival for supper, cooked by my sister: egg and prawn mousse, cold beef and salads, raspberries. “But don’t eat the mousse” she tells us, “It’s been sitting in the sun too long and will probably kill you.” We know that Zam will ignore this but Clare and I nod at each other. We’re not touching it. My only job, other than to turn up, is to bring cream.

"... don't eat the mousse."

I have it in my head that we are “borrowing” the supper tent from people now sitting in the first half of the opera and that we must disappear without trace before they emerge from the theatre. “What time does the interval start?” Nobody seems to know or care.

I’m so anxious I have second helpings of mousse. The other guests are so late they’ve tucked in before anyone has time to warn them. Then I realise I’ve forgotten the cream so we pour milk onto raspberries but it moves too quickly - as Tom explains while telling me to hold a glass by it’s stem. All I can see is the gardening dirt under my nails. Milk, dirt and poisonous prawns. I haven’t seen the photographs.

a photograph taken at sunset overlooking the rows of grapevines in Burges Field

I am sitting under a grey sky outside a bookshop talking to a friend. “And it’s June,” I say morosely, waving in disgust at the opposite of a late Spring sky. “Is it?” There is a note of panic in her voice, a flash in her eyes I wasn’t expecting, “Well no, not quite… but you know…” I am exaggerating, but only by six days. Her face relaxes, “Thank god for that,” she says. I’m about to concede that at least it ISN’T quite June when she adds “We’re very competitive in our family and if it was the 1st June and I hadn’t got pinch and punch in first I’d be...” she trails off, seeing my expression.

At home, the rain pelts down on freshly planted sweet peas which lie forlornly on the soil… Until last week they were in a new plastic greenhouse I begged Zam to buy (this is the definition of an object he cannot stand, but I persuaded him his Turban squash seedlings needed it). When the gales blew it over leaving young plants scattered from their pots, he shoved it in the shed where it will probably live for the rest of its days. This happened on the same day that a pallet of shiny foils destined to dress the necks of the long–awaited magnums was also caught in some wind-related courier catastrophe (the details of which remain mysterious) and have been crushed, useless. He puts on his coat, his wet boots… steps over the parsley and coriander seedlings drowning in puddles by the back door.

“Where are you going?” I shout at his retreating back, my words almost lost in the wind. “A Spring Evening Tour of the vineyard,” he shouts back. When he returns it’s dark but his mood is light – it always is after these events because he can talk about vines, buds, pruning techniques, dosages, brix levels… without his audience wandering off. “And they ask really good questions.” “Where did you eat?” I ask. He looks at me, and I realise he thinks this isn’t one of them.

Impression of The Grange Hampshire winery at the Burge's Field vineyard

We are very happy to announce the arrival of Harry Pickering as our first in-house Winemaker. Harry’s appointment follows a six-month global search with over a hundred applicants from eleven countries – but he’s joining us from Gusbourne, just up the road in East Sussex. There he has worked with Charlie Holland since 2015, helping to establish a renowned range that stands at the forefront of English wine.

We had a hundred applicants from eleven countries - but the answer was just up the road...

After training in land management, the wine bug bit bad and, over the last 11 years, Harry has gained experience at vineyards and wineries in the Corbieres AOC in France, in West (as well as East) Sussex and in the Waipara and Otago regions of New Zealand, where he also spent much of 2014 studying Viticulture and Oenology at Lincoln University.

The appointment is a critical step in the next phase of The Grange's development and, once he arrives in June, Harry will be overseeing the build and fit out of our sleek new winery designed by Timothy Hatton Architects (see above). After that he will be tasked with taking the complex, rich and layered sparkling style we have developed with Emma Rice at Hattingley to the next level, as well as developing new sparkling and still wines and setting up a small high-end contract wine-making operation.

After the nightmare of 2020, it looks like 2021 is going to be a busy year!

A winter morning in Burges Field in Hampshire, with a pink tinge to the sky over the rows of grapevines

With the grapes through the presses and the juices fermenting, the days are shortening and the damp and the chill starting to dominate, so it is something of a relief to be able to spend less time in the vineyard and put one’s feet up and look back on this bizarre year – there has certainly been a lot going, even leaving C-19 to one side.

From the viticultural point of view it has been mixed. The terrible frosts of April and May hit us hard, reducing yields, but the generally lovely weather since those frosts has led to remarkable quality in all varieties and I am really looking forward to tasting the wines come 2024, even if they turn out to be rare jewels.

"...an astonishing carpet of gold and purple."

In Burge's Field the leaves are dropping, coating the ground with an astonishing carpet of gold and purple. Phil and Sam are looking towards the arrival of our peripatetic flock of sheep (to tidy up the grass and add some welcome manure) and then, after a quiet January, the frozen joys of February pruning...

Outside the vineyard in 2020, the 2015 based wines have been doing very well in the various wine competitions we have entered and have won 7 Silver medals, 2 Golds and a Platinum between them. Driven on by these amazing votes of confidence for what we have always thought were lovely wines, the sales team, spearheaded by Claire, has also been going great guns. Highlights include Daylesford stocking both wines at all their stores, Hawkins Brothers taking the CLASSIC and Haynes Hanson and Clark adding the PINK to the already stocked CLASSIC. Beyond that we also got on to the wine list at The Pig Hotel in The New Forest and the fabulously fashionable Hut at Colwell Bay on the Isle of Wight.

2020 will mainly be remembered for this miserable and terrifying virus but, in amongst the horror of those memories, we here at The Grange will have some little Platinum coloured glints...

Author: Zam Baring

The Wine Widow on photography

The Wine Widow and the landrover

The Wine Widow does marketing

The Wine Widow and the summer

Coming soon to a vineyard near Itchen Stoke!

Some January cheer…

The Vineyard year is over now…